What we’ve said about Defense mechanisms

“defenses are called defenses because we're calling them that way in a specific pathological context. But what they really are is they're just what the mind does”

“you have certain capacities you have certain abilities um in psychodynamic terms we would call them defenses and Right. That can mitigate or sublimate aspects of your animal instincts”

“we all have primitive defenses. It's not just the sick patient. The primitive defenses, and I'm using primitive not in a way to try to pathologize them, but just to descriptively say they come up early in our experience”

“What makes a difference as to whether you're able to be more adaptive in the world is not that you have primitive defenses, but it's more that you don't have adaptive higher order defenses, like repression is a higher order defense than denial”

“If your partner breaks up with you, you don't immediately go to, gee, I can understand why, given his history, he wouldn't have found me the right partner. You go to, he's a bastard, I hate him. So that's splitting”

“Regressions are creative and ego-mediated. Projections or regressions are owned. And that really helped me in that, like what you're saying that”

“anytime you see somebody avoiding a line of thinking, a way of saying something, or in many cases in the film, literally running away from an interviewer by making some kind of excuse, those are all good examples of psychological or interpersonal defenses”

“the patient's use of very primitive, if you will, defense mechanisms of projection, projective identification, identification with the aggressor. sort of our central core features of this disorder”

“the core defense is that they have little access to their emotional lives. So these are people who are much more comfortable in the realm of thought, ideas, rather than getting to their feelings”

“some lower level defenses that can be quite present. in people with lower level personality functioning are general paranoia. It's just a generally paranoid person. Are they always kind of guarded, looking out for people, taking advantage of them or trying to harm them”

“If it's an evenly flowing river and then suddenly they stop talking or suddenly they change the subject, right? You might think of the river damming up or the river changing direction”

“there is a difference between simply pointing it out, pointing it out repeatedly over time, and pointing out the pattern or the behavior and linking it to both how it helps the patient, how it's adaptive and how it hurts the patient, how it's maladaptive”

“a big part of our job is common sense. And using your common sense for when a patient reports like, oh, I had a breakup a week ago and I'm doing spectacular”

“Usually in the moment, I can't identify what the defense is. It's only kind of after the appointment's over and I have some time to reflect that I'm able to maybe put words to what i was experiencing or identify what the specific defense was”