A thought surfaces and is gone the next moment. A feeling stirs and, barely noticed, turns into something else. Defense mechanisms operate automatically. No one decides in the morning to repress or deny anything today: The psyche blocks out what it cannot bear at that moment, and does so before consciousness is even consulted.
Defense mechanisms themselves are normal. In psychotherapy, they only become an issue when they hinder more than they protect.
The structural level describes how stable and how differentiated a person’s inner order is: how well one is able to experience oneself and others as a whole, with rough edges and contradictions, rather than in black and white. Ermann distinguishes between a low, a moderate, and a high structural level, with a mature personality organization as the ideal case at the upper end.
It is a continuum, not a pigeonhole: No one simply has a “low” or a “high” structural level; everyone moves within this range and can change with the situation and over time, including through depth psychology-based psychotherapy.
The structural level shapes which defense mechanisms a person prefers to use, early ones like splitting or mature ones like repression. In practical terms, this means that people who tend to use mature mechanisms hold relationships together even through disappointments, and their self-esteem remains stable after a bad day. Those who tend to fall back on early mechanisms such as splitting experience relationships and themselves more easily in extremes, with less continuity in between.
Defense and coping are related, but they are not the same thing. Both are psychological processes that serve inner balance, albeit in different ways. Coping is a more or less conscious process: A person changes their feelings, thoughts, or behavior to deal with an ongoing stressor.
Defense mechanisms, on the other hand, operate largely unconsciously. They kick in when a task seems unsolvable and exclude the problem from conscious awareness without actually solving it. Ermann describes defense mechanisms as processes that exclude overwhelming experiences from the field of consciousness: automatic, not consciously experienced, and not voluntarily controlled.
However, the boundary is permeable, according to Ermann’s own account. He describes denial as a defense mechanism that also functions as a coping mechanism for dealing with stress. The same process can therefore occur on either side of the boundary, depending on how consciously it takes place.
You can practice coping. You usually don't notice defense mechanisms until they've already kicked in.
Personality development begins with early defenses, which are later joined by mature ones. Ermann refers to them as splitting-based defense and repression-based defense. Both forms coexist, to varying degrees, throughout a person’s entire life.
Repression removes a single intolerable element (an impulse, a feeling, a perception) from consciousness, but the overall picture of oneself and of the other remains intact and able to hold contradictions. It is possible to love someone and be disappointed in them at the same time without that person turning into two different people. This ability to hold opposites together is what Ermann calls integration, and it is a relatively mature achievement of the ego.
Splitting does something else: It does not keep a single element out but breaks the entire image of a person, or of the self, into two separate packages, one that is only good and one that is only bad. Both exist, but never at the same time. At the tipping point, usually a strong disappointment, the experience flips from one package to the other. The person who was ideal only a moment ago is suddenly nothing but bad, and the good version that came before no longer matters at that moment.
Some defense mechanisms are not tied to any particular stage of development. They occur at every structural level, in both mature and early defenses.
Internalization is a fundamental mechanism of development: we adopt the characteristics of other people. It can also serve as a defense against emotions.
Introjection takes in the other as a whole; one experiences oneself as fused with that person. That person remains inside as a foreign body, and one continues to relate to them: they speak, praise, punish, and make demands. After the mother’s death, someone adopts her turns of phrase and even opinions that they had resisted during her lifetime. Those who carry the other person within themselves have not yet lost them entirely, and the grieving process is postponed.
Imitation takes on only the form, not the person. The other person remains a counterpart. What comes across is his demeanor, worn like a borrowed garment. That’s how a fourteen-year-old suddenly starts talking and dressing like the older cousin he admires.
Under stress, this becomes a stopgap measure: People with ego weakness resort to symptoms they have observed in others, often in people they aren’t even close to. You can recognize this imitation precisely because what they have adopted holds no special meaning for them personally.
Mature identification involves taking on individual traits through empathy and making them one’s own. Something has been digested here. For example, someone observed a former boss listening first and then making a decision during a crisis, and years later does the same thing without even thinking about her.
The key question regarding all three is: Is there still someone inside? In the case of introjection, yes. In the case of imitation, no, because no one ever entered. In the case of identification, no, because one has become that person oneself. As a defense mechanism, internalization is directed against separation and loss. Those who become like the other do not lose them.
Ermann specifically mentions two special forms. Identification with the expectations of others, which he also calls submission: A person becomes what parents, partners, and employers want to see in them, and that ensures they receive affection. The price is one’s own will. And identification with the aggressor, which works in two directions. In Ermann’s overview of defense mechanisms, one turns external aggression against oneself: a child who was beaten explains as an adult that they deserved the beatings. In his chapter on trauma, one shifts into the perpetrator’s position and thus distances oneself from one’s own fear, shame, and vulnerability. Both are the same arrangement viewed from two sides. Ermann describes it as sadomasochistic: one part treats another part harshly, and that part submits.
Regression involves abandoning the current structural level in favor of earlier ways of experiencing. This is usually triggered by conflicts and experiences that cannot be processed. An adult then unconsciously begins to feel and behave like a child. No one decides this: The earlier stage is less demanding, and that protects.
In everyday life, this process is so common that it hardly gets noticed. When you’re sick in bed, you become smaller. You let others take care of you, hand decisions over, and are more sensitive than usual. The forty-five-year-old sits at his parents’ kitchen table on Christmas and, after an hour, is fourteen again, using the same phrases and displaying the same irritability. During an argument, someone falls back into silence and slamming doors, even though he can negotiate calmly in any meeting. These are temporary shifts, and they subside on their own.
Structural regression is the longer form. Here, mature ways of functioning are abandoned and replaced by more immature ones: repression gives way to splitting, or a feeling that had already been put into words returns to the body. It can go as far as a loss of touch with reality and of the sense of self.
In denial, a reality is perceived cognitively, but acknowledgment of it is refused, partly or completely. The smoker knows the statistics and continues to smoke; the diagnosis is heard and immediately afterward treated as if nothing had been said. The finding exists, but it doesn’t count.
Everyone is familiar with this partial denial, and at first it offers protection. When it becomes complete, it indicates a severe regression.
Mature defense mechanisms come into play later, both in terms of developmental history and at any given moment. Four mechanisms fall into this category.
Repression makes an intention, an idea, an impulse, or a perception unconscious; it is literally forgotten. Repression is different from everyday forgetting or consciously pushing something aside: A forgotten name or appointment does not, in and of itself, prove repression.
An example of repression: making a promise to yourself to finally bring up a certain topic, only to forget about it just when the moment is right. The intention is made unconscious just before it could become uncomfortable.
In displacement, a feeling shifts away from its original target toward a less threatening substitute target. In the mature repression-based defense, anger and aggressive impulses are not repressed into the unconscious but are redirected away from those they are actually intended for. Ermann cites as an example anger directed at a rival that is instead redirected toward those in a weaker position.
He also describes displacement as a typical mechanism in phobias. Instead of being felt as vague and therefore almost unbearable, the fear attaches to a target that is neutral in itself but concrete and avoidable, such as a spider.
In reaction formation, a frowned-upon impulse is replaced by its opposite. Forbidden impulses do not disappear in the process; rather, they manifest themselves in reverse. The wish to confront someone turns into “fake friendliness.”
People who cannot treat themselves to anything without feeling guilty instead take excessive care of others and not infrequently choose a low-paying helping profession: Ermann describes this as a typical pattern of the depressive personality. People who cannot tolerate their own aggression become conspicuously controlled and orderly, which according to Ermann is a core trait in compulsive personalities.
Emotional repression encompasses three related mechanisms. What they have in common is that the emotions associated with an experience are made unconscious. The process by which this occurs differs in each case.
Intellectualization shifts the experience to the conceptual level. One thinks and talks about what has happened, thereby keeping it at arm's length.
Rationalization retroactively reinterprets motives or adds new ones without the person realizing it. The result is behavior that appears to have good reasons behind it.
Isolation of affect separates experience from affect. The thought remains, but without the feeling that actually goes with it.
Early defense begins earlier, both in terms of developmental history and at any given moment. It takes its name from its central mechanism, splitting itself, and is supplemented by four additional mechanisms.
In the process of splitting, conflicting perceptions coexist unconnected within the same person and alternate with one another. A person is perceived as either entirely good or entirely bad; rarely both at the same time. At the point of transition, there is usually a strong emotion, often disappointment.
This is most evident in relationships. One day, someone seems close and dependable; after a disappointment, they seem only distant, and completely so. The positive experience from yesterday no longer matters at that moment; it isn’t diminished, but rather out of reach. The same pattern runs through whole areas of life. In the first few weeks, the new employer is the best there’s ever been; after the first criticism in a team meeting, the entire company is seen as dishonest, and the resignation letter is written that very evening. There is no transition between the two images.
One’s self-image can also fall apart in this way. On Monday, someone is certain they can do anything; on Wednesday, certain they are worthless. And the Wednesday self has no access to the Monday self. The image of the other person falls apart in exactly the same way: Instead of tolerating both love and anger toward the same person at the same time, one splits that person into a loving part and an angry part. Aggressive and loving aspects of the personality remain separate, rather than merging into a single image.
Splitting rarely remains internal. Ermann describes how interpersonal dynamics are distributed among professional groups in hospitals. The emotionally taxing aspects fall to the nursing staff, while the professionally detached aspects fall to the doctors; and the more a patient’s suffering touches them, the more the roles become polarized, until this leads to conflicts within the treatment team.
Primary splitting means that this ability to hold together the good and the bad in a person never developed. It was absent from the very beginning, not because it was lost, but because it never developed in the first place.
Secondary splitting means something else: The ability was there, so it had already emerged at some point during development. Under intense pressure, however, it breaks down again, and the person temporarily reverts to the very state they had actually already overcome. So the difference is: never achieved versus lost again.
Idealization and devaluation are similar to splitting, but lead to significantly less polarization. Ermann describes them as typical of narcissistic patients at a moderate structural level.
At first, a new acquaintance seems extraordinary; after an initial disappointment, they seem merely ordinary. Unlike in splitting, a middle ground remains: the assessment fluctuates, but there is no complete shift in opinion.
In projection, an unwanted personal experience is unconsciously attributed to another person in order to stabilize one’s sense of self. Unpleasant aspects of one’s personality are projected outward and reappear in the other person.
A feeling that would threaten one’s self-respect resurfaces, but in the other person: On this day, anyone who can’t stand their own irritability will notice, above all, how irritable everyone else seems.
Gestalt therapy also works with this process deliberately. In empty chair therapy, a projected aspect takes shape as a counterpart on an empty chair, so that an encounter with it becomes possible.
Projective identification goes a step further than projection. The other person carries one’s own emotion. More than that, one’s own behavior causes the other person to actually feel it. One is usually aware of the influence itself, while its defensive purpose remains unconscious. Ermann calls projective identification a typical borderline mechanism, but he also cites it as a perfectly normal process of pre-linguistic communication between a mother and her infant.
I’ve experienced this myself in sessions: Someone doesn’t understand the simplest statement, and I feel compelled to explain and describe it over and over again until I start to get annoyed, before I realize what’s actually going on between us.
Ermann describes a similar pattern in the assessment of suicidality: Inhibited aggression that the patient himself does not perceive may manifest itself to the examiner as anxiety or anger, and this is precisely where projective identification comes into play.
In the case of splitting, everything is still there, just divided into a good image and a bad one. In post-traumatic dissociation, something is missing: the memory, the bodily sensation, or the emotion associated with it. Imagine two states that occur in quick succession and are completely unaware of each other: In the first, someone experiences a threat while fully awake; in the second, shortly afterward, nothing of it remains: no image, no feeling, no bodily sensation. This is exactly what Ermann means: Whoever is currently in the second, present state can no longer access the first, previous one; to their current consciousness, it is as if it had never existed.
The fragmentation of the self ranges from individual dissociated perceptions to entire subpersonalities. A well-known example is depersonalization: In acute threatening situations, many people experience a sense of standing outside themselves, with one part observing from the outside while another, “depersonalized” part bears the actual experience, which creates distance from the threat.
With dissociative fugue or multiple personality, it goes further: Separate identities with distinct behaviors emerge, such as “my self on the run” and “my self in safety,” which take turns replacing one another. The idea behind this, in Ermann’s words: One part of the personality should not know what the other is doing, or it is kept safe through the dissociation. I describe how a treatment develops from this in the article on depth psychology-based trauma therapy.
The problem is not the defense mechanisms themselves, but their excess and rigidity. Defense mechanisms in and of themselves remain healthy, as does coping. Every defense mechanism offers a benefit: It reduces tension, and as long as it does so in a flexible way, there is nothing pathological about it.
Three possible consequences. Repression leads to a parapraxis: Appointments that one doesn’t really want to keep are forgotten, or one is repeatedly late without being able to explain why. Regression gives rise to symptoms; his own example of this is wetting oneself: Under stress, an adult loses control over a function that he has mastered since childhood. And if a mechanism remains in use over the long term, it becomes a neurotic character trait, for example in someone who spends their entire life caring for others and never treats themselves to anything, or in someone who can barely tolerate disorder around them.
The defense mechanism has, in a sense, outlived its original purpose: it no longer protects against the original threat. If you find yourself experiencing the same mechanism year after year, and it weighs on you, it’s worth taking a second look at what it once protected you from. In the case of excessive control, for example, this could be an old fear of one’s own aggression, which once seemed dangerous. What it actually was remains, for now, a guess, and it cannot be deduced from a single situation.
What is called defense within the psyche appears in treatment as resistance. The two concepts are closely related but are not the same. Ermann sees a causal connection between them: For him, the reason for resistance is the defense against conflicts and emotions that a treatment itself evokes in the first place. Treatment is, so to speak, an attack on defense mechanisms.
And he distinguishes between two forms: In the case of repression resistance, there is indeed a defense mechanism at work, for example when someone talks at length about things long past while a pressing problem in their current life remains unaddressed, or when silence keeps at bay the shame or anger that the therapy has just brought to the surface. Structural resistance, in his own words, is a structural deficit, not a defense against conflict or emotion: The same silence can also mean that the words for the feeling are simply missing, an alexithymia that cannot be interpreted but can only be slowly filled in. Anyone who stays silent is therefore not warding something off in every case.
I most often perceive resistance as a sense of emptiness in the countertransference. Often, this looks like the defense mechanisms described earlier, intellectualization or isolation of affect: The patient retreats into their mind and keeps talking, while their emotions and body can no longer keep up. The mind then seems disconnected and acts on its own, while I myself feel a void where there was connection just a moment ago. This feeling doesn’t prove anything. It is a clue that I follow up on, and it may just as well have to do with me, with the day, or with the fit between the two of us.
Defense itself is certainly a subject of the therapeutic work. What ultimately determines whether defense is even needed anymore, however, is something else: what precedes it. Defense merely keeps out of consciousness whatever a person is currently unable to bear. Translated into the inner perspective of the person in treatment:
Only then will I no longer need to push them away. Once it becomes bearable, because I can feel it and regulate myself in the process, there is nothing left for the defense to do. It is not trained away; it becomes unnecessary because something else has taken over its task.
The classification into mature and early defenses sounds neater than it is. Ermann himself calls this strict separation arbitrary. Especially at a moderate structural level, both forms can coexist in the same person. Under pressure, a more mature defense may also give way to an earlier one that had actually already receded.
The list itself is not neutral either. Sublimation, which Anna Freud cited as a prime example of a mature defense mechanism, does not appear in Ermann’s overview. And the number of mechanisms that actually exist depends on whom you ask: Ermann lists twelve, Anna Freud ten, and the Defense Mechanisms Rating Scales used in current research thirty, organized into seven levels. Above all, this shows that different traditions categorize things differently. That does not make any of them incomplete.
And: In the two German S3 guidelines on severe impairment of personality functions and on borderline personality disorder, the term “defense” does not appear even once. That does not mean the concept has been refuted. It means it is a clinically descriptive tool, not a guideline term. Guidelines instead refer to the structural level, assessed, for example, through the Operationalized Psychodynamic Diagnostics (OPD) interview. The guideline itself refers to this as a closely related psychodynamic construct, and that is exactly what it is: related to the distinction between mature and early defense mechanisms, but not the same measurement axis.
The term originates from the Anglo-American research tradition, which classifies defense mechanisms into stages based on their level of maturity. In that tradition, it is an umbrella term. In Ermann’s system, this corresponds most closely to the early splitting-based defense: splitting, idealization and devaluation, projection, and projective identification. The two classifications are not identical.
Yes, according to Anna Freud. Ermann’s overview, the basis of this article, does not list it in this form. Two standard works, two different lists.
There is no binding figure. According to Ermann, there are twelve defense mechanisms, divided into four groups: ubiquitous defense, repression-based defense, splitting-based defense, and post-traumatic defense. In her classic overview, Anna Freud counts ten, some of them different ones. The Defense Mechanisms Rating Scales distinguish thirty. These numbers belong to different classification systems and cannot be directly compared.
An automatic, unconscious process that shields the psyche from experiences it cannot process at that moment. No one uses it intentionally, and no one notices it as it occurs. The mechanism always involves both protection and its cost: what remains excluded cannot be processed.
The current structural level is abandoned in favor of earlier, mostly more childlike ways of experiencing, either temporarily or for a longer period. Examples from everyday life and the longer-term, structural form are discussed earlier in the section on regression.
Michael Ermann: Psychotherapie und Psychosomatik (Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics). 7th, expanded and revised edition, W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2020, ISBN 978-3-17-036800-2.
The overview is in the chapter “Erleben und Entwicklung aus psychoanalytischer Sicht” (Experience and Development From a Psychoanalytic Perspective), the section on resistance in the chapter “Einfuehrung in die Psychoanalyse” (Introduction to Psychoanalysis).
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