Amygdala speaks: On freudian defenses
NB: I write this article to share some wonderful ideas I discovered in a book with my readers. Consequently, most of the content here is directly excerpted from the book.
I'm sure you've heard of at least some of the defense mechanisms that Sigmund and Anna Freud studied and outlined. The most popular ones would be denial and repression, and the lesser known ones are perhaps intellectualization, sublimation, reaction formation and displacement. In layman terms, a defense mechanism is a strategy that our brain employs to cope with reality, especially those situations that are unpleasant. I have always wondered about the purpose of defense mechanisms: why do they exist? what do they accomplish?
The traditional explanation that Freud proposed and has been widely accepted is that it helps ward off unpleasantness, stress or anxiety that is situational. While this made sense to some extent, I still had questions: Isn't a false perception of reality harmful? Does this benefit the organism exhibiting such behavior at all?
Recently, in Phantoms in the Brain, I came across a wonderful explanation, something that had never occurred to me. The author, Ramachandran, hypothesizes that defense mechanisms exist to minimize computational overhead and to enable faster and consistent decision making. As a systems engineer, this explanation made perfect sense to me, and I could relate to why the brain had been designed to work precisely this way. Because he has done a superlative job of explaining this, I will take the liberty to excerpt a few key paragraphs that explain and illustrate this with examples:
At any given moment in our waking lives, our brains are flooded with a bewildering array of sensory inputs, all of which must be incorporated into a coherent perspective that's based on what stored memories already tell us is true about ourselves and the world. In order to generate coherent actions, the brain must have some way of sifting through this superabundance of detail and of ordering it into a stable and internally consistent "belief system"—a story that makes sense of the available evidence. Each time a new item of information comes in we fold it seamlessly into our preexisting worldview.
But now suppose something comes along that does not quite fit the plot. What do you do? One option is to tear up the entire script and start from scratch: completely revise your story to create a new model about the world and about yourself. The problem is that if you did this for every little piece of threatening information, your behavior would soon become chaotic and unstable; you would go mad. What your left hemisphere does instead is either ignore the anomaly completely or distort it to squeeze it into your preexisting framework, to preserve stability. And this, I suggest, is the essential rationale behind all the so − called Freudian defenses—the denials, repressions, confabulations and other forms of self − delusion that govern our daily lives. Far from being maladaptive, such everyday defense mechanisms prevent the brain from being hounded into directionless indecision by the "combinatorial explosion" of possible stories that might be written from the material available to the senses. The penalty, of course, is that you are "lying" to yourself, but it's a small price to pay for the coherence and stability conferred on the system as a whole.
Imagine, for example, a military general about to wage war on the enemy. It is late at night and he is in the war room planning strategies for the next day. Scouts keep coming into the room to give him information about the lay of the land, terrain, light level and so forth. They also tell him that the enemy has five hundred tanks and that he has six hundred tanks, a fact that prompts the general to decide to wage war. He positions all of his troops in strategic locations and decides to launch battle exactly at 6: 00 a.m. with sunrise.
Imagine further that at 5: 55 A.M. one little scout comes running into the war room and says, "General! I have bad news." With minutes to go until battle, the general asks, "What is that?" and the scout replies, "I just looked through binoculars and saw that the enemy has seven hundred tanks, not five hundred!" What does the general—the left hemisphere—do? Time is of the essence and he simply can't afford the luxury of revising all his battle plans. So he orders the scout to shut up and tell no one about what he saw. Denial!
Indeed, he may even shoot the scout and hide the report in a drawer labeled "top secret" (repression). In doing so, he relies on the high probability that the majority opinion—the previous information by all the scouts—was correct and that this single new item of information coming from one source is probably wrong. So the general sticks to his original position.
Not only that, but for fear of mutiny, he might order the scout actually to lie to the other generals and tell them that he only saw five hundred tanks (confabulation).
The purpose of all of this is to impose stability on behavior and to prevent vacillation because indecisiveness doesn't serve any purpose. Any decision, so long as it is probably correct, is better than no decision at all. A perpetually fickle general will never win a war! In this analogy, the general is the left hemisphere (Freud's "ego," perhaps?), and his behavior is analogous to the kinds of denials and repressions you see in both healthy people and patients with anosognosia.
P.S: Do read the book! There's more to this, and the author substantiates most of his claims using clinical research, which made the whole experience(hypothesis-experiment-proof) very satisfying to me.
I'm sure you've heard of at least some of the defense mechanisms that Sigmund and Anna Freud studied and outlined. The most popular ones would be denial and repression, and the lesser known ones are perhaps intellectualization, sublimation, reaction formation and displacement. In layman terms, a defense mechanism is a strategy that our brain employs to cope with reality, especially those situations that are unpleasant. I have always wondered about the purpose of defense mechanisms: why do they exist? what do they accomplish?
The traditional explanation that Freud proposed and has been widely accepted is that it helps ward off unpleasantness, stress or anxiety that is situational. While this made sense to some extent, I still had questions: Isn't a false perception of reality harmful? Does this benefit the organism exhibiting such behavior at all?
Recently, in Phantoms in the Brain, I came across a wonderful explanation, something that had never occurred to me. The author, Ramachandran, hypothesizes that defense mechanisms exist to minimize computational overhead and to enable faster and consistent decision making. As a systems engineer, this explanation made perfect sense to me, and I could relate to why the brain had been designed to work precisely this way. Because he has done a superlative job of explaining this, I will take the liberty to excerpt a few key paragraphs that explain and illustrate this with examples:
At any given moment in our waking lives, our brains are flooded with a bewildering array of sensory inputs, all of which must be incorporated into a coherent perspective that's based on what stored memories already tell us is true about ourselves and the world. In order to generate coherent actions, the brain must have some way of sifting through this superabundance of detail and of ordering it into a stable and internally consistent "belief system"—a story that makes sense of the available evidence. Each time a new item of information comes in we fold it seamlessly into our preexisting worldview.
But now suppose something comes along that does not quite fit the plot. What do you do? One option is to tear up the entire script and start from scratch: completely revise your story to create a new model about the world and about yourself. The problem is that if you did this for every little piece of threatening information, your behavior would soon become chaotic and unstable; you would go mad. What your left hemisphere does instead is either ignore the anomaly completely or distort it to squeeze it into your preexisting framework, to preserve stability. And this, I suggest, is the essential rationale behind all the so − called Freudian defenses—the denials, repressions, confabulations and other forms of self − delusion that govern our daily lives. Far from being maladaptive, such everyday defense mechanisms prevent the brain from being hounded into directionless indecision by the "combinatorial explosion" of possible stories that might be written from the material available to the senses. The penalty, of course, is that you are "lying" to yourself, but it's a small price to pay for the coherence and stability conferred on the system as a whole.
Imagine, for example, a military general about to wage war on the enemy. It is late at night and he is in the war room planning strategies for the next day. Scouts keep coming into the room to give him information about the lay of the land, terrain, light level and so forth. They also tell him that the enemy has five hundred tanks and that he has six hundred tanks, a fact that prompts the general to decide to wage war. He positions all of his troops in strategic locations and decides to launch battle exactly at 6: 00 a.m. with sunrise.
Imagine further that at 5: 55 A.M. one little scout comes running into the war room and says, "General! I have bad news." With minutes to go until battle, the general asks, "What is that?" and the scout replies, "I just looked through binoculars and saw that the enemy has seven hundred tanks, not five hundred!" What does the general—the left hemisphere—do? Time is of the essence and he simply can't afford the luxury of revising all his battle plans. So he orders the scout to shut up and tell no one about what he saw. Denial!
Indeed, he may even shoot the scout and hide the report in a drawer labeled "top secret" (repression). In doing so, he relies on the high probability that the majority opinion—the previous information by all the scouts—was correct and that this single new item of information coming from one source is probably wrong. So the general sticks to his original position.
Not only that, but for fear of mutiny, he might order the scout actually to lie to the other generals and tell them that he only saw five hundred tanks (confabulation).
The purpose of all of this is to impose stability on behavior and to prevent vacillation because indecisiveness doesn't serve any purpose. Any decision, so long as it is probably correct, is better than no decision at all. A perpetually fickle general will never win a war! In this analogy, the general is the left hemisphere (Freud's "ego," perhaps?), and his behavior is analogous to the kinds of denials and repressions you see in both healthy people and patients with anosognosia.
P.S: Do read the book! There's more to this, and the author substantiates most of his claims using clinical research, which made the whole experience(hypothesis-experiment-proof) very satisfying to me.
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