Some Other Mental Mechanisms in Operation

From the descriptions and examples of mental mechanisms already given it should be obvious that hidden struggles and conflicts within the unconscious mind create not only psychosomatic illness but also the wide di­versity of characters and personalities we meet in real life and in fiction. Without going into the complete details of the psychic processes involved in each, we shall give brief descriptions of generally recognizable "stock characters" whose peculiar behavior patterns are controlled by overworking ego defenses and mental mechanisms.

The extrovert. He turns to the outside world, to fierce rounds of activity, to careless and unreflective action in order to smother his inner conflicts. "The life of the party" is usu­ally running away from himself.

The introvert. He substitutes thought for action. He shrinks from his social environ­ment. He finds decision painfully difficult. He looks too long before he leaps.

 The perfectionist. He sets his goals so high that neither he himself nor others can reasonably criticize him for failing to achieve them.

The specialist. He chooses so odd or unique a line of endeavor that there is little compe­tition in it; thus he escapes the normal com­petitive struggle.

The know it all." He covers up his inner sense of inadequacy by an attitude of supe­riority. He appears too cocksure, dogmatic, and positive about his knowledge and opin­ions- He knows all the answers, he thinks; but he holds only minor jobs.

Mrs. Grundy. She viciously gossips about and criticizes others to compensate for her own feelings of inferiority. She secretly fears that, given the chance, she would behave worse than those she criticizes.

The alibi artist. He cannot face overt criti­cism. He fears that others will discover and confirm the low opinion he has about himself.

The isolationist. His unconscious mind has fashioned logic-tight compartments so that some parts of his inconsistent, paradoxical, multiple personality are completely isolated from others. This is the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde character. A more recent portrayal of the multiple personality is to be found in the well-known psychiatric study entitled Three Faces of Eve.

The symbolist. He performs symbolic acts as a bribe to his superego in order to blot out or undo even more painful thoughts lurking in his unconscious mind. A classic example is Lady Macbeth repeatedly washing her hands in the vain hope of washing away her deeper feelings of guilt about having instigated murder.

The fetishist. He displaces his stong feelings for a person onto a thing. Afraid to express openly a love for a particular woman, he holds some physical symbol of her a hand­kerchief, a lock of her hair in even higher esteem.

Pollyanna. She persistently looks at the world through rose-colored glasses. She child­ishly denies that life includes struggle and difficulty. Eventually she is tripped up and overwhelmed by it.

Sublimation

Sublimation means directing, channelizing, and converting basic emotional drives, crude instinctual impulses, into socially acceptable and useful activities It is the true taming of the id by the ego under direction of the su­perego. Sublimations are the most construc­tive compromises and the happiest solutions to the inevitable frustrations that life sets before us. Though difficult to achieve, they bring social reward and approval which rein­forces and strengthens the ego.

Sublimations take many forms. Some serve for a time; others for a lifetime. The lives of dedicated men and women scientists, art­ists, missionaries, and others devoted to great causes illuminate how satisfying and crea­tive sublimations can be Pierre and Marie Curie, discoverers of radium, offer a lofty ex­ample of beautifully sublimated lives. So does the life of Abraham Lincoln. The creative arts have served man any as a  means of sublimating their inner drives and conflicts. Most com­monly the making of a home and the rearing of a family give the opportunity for the subli­mation of feelings to a most socially useful end.

Sublimation is not entirely an unconscious process. Conscious will, thought, and effort enter into it. One deliberately chooses realis­tic goals and activities which he can step by step, in spite of frustrations and difficulties, hope to reach This is the uphill road to sus­tained personal happiness the only road there is.

Idealization

Identification of the young child with his parents gradually turns into idealization of them. The child's own ego ideals, the secret inner picture of himself as he feels he would like to be, are permanently established in his superego by this process of idealization.

Idealization, as a mental mechanism, is a device the ego adopts to escape the recrimi­nations of the superego. When it substitutes other ideals for the original parent ideals, it always includes at the core of the new ideals some fraction of the original pattern. "Ideal­istic love," as we have noted, is shaped in the inner image of one's parents.

Like identification, idealization is usually uncritical. This often leads to overestimation of the people toward whom it is directed. We see idealization blissfully at work in young lovers, who refuse to see the least blemish in their beloveds.

Idealization is also employed at the very highest cultural levels in religious worship and love of God, commonly idealized as Father, all-powerful and all-loving. We attribute  to God  all  that is best in  man.

Regression

Regression means reverting to immature and often childish behavior in the presence of current difficulties and frustrations. In terms of overt behavior it is one of the easiest of the mental mechanisms to observe and identify in other people. We all know the boy who won't play if he can't be captain of the team; the girl who sulks or goes into a temper tantrum if she misses a much-desired date; the tennis player who smashes his racket when he loses a match; the "perpetual undergraduate" col­lege alumnus, yelling himself hoarse at a football game; the child who throws himself on the floor and screams at the top of his lungs when he is denied candy. Not all re­gressive behavior is as obvious as the exam­ples given, but they should give the general idea.

Regression is a retreat from the complexi­ties of the present to the fancied security of the past. The ego feels more comfortable  for the moment in seeking an old solution for a present problem. Tears and tantrums, how­ever, rarely if ever get a person what he really wants.

Projection

Nobody likes to fail. We frequently seek to excuse our own failings by blaming them on someone or something else. The student who is failing a college course may sincerely but erroneously believe that the instructor is down on him the poor workman blames his tools Auto accidents are always "the other fellow's fault." When the ego rejects respon­sibility for failure and projects the blame elsewhere, it is employing the mental mecha­nism of projection.

But the process of projection may be much broader than merely excusing. We may, for example, project our own feelings on other people or the world at large. When we feel "blue," we may see the whole world as black. This is a false picture. We often attri­bute our own most undesirable traits to other people. If we are "bad." they are worse. We are most prone to project on others those feelings which trouble us most. Thus, if we feel secretly hostile toward somebody else, we may imagine that he is equally hostile toward us which may or may not be the case. Seeing others in a distorted image of our­selves may make us unduly critical, sarcasiic, cynical, and pessimistic.

Substitution

Substitution and displacement are mental mechanisms akin to projection. We sometimes substitute one love object for another as does the childless woman who lavishes ma­ternal affection upon a dog or cat. We may also displace our feelings, sometimes because we are afraid to express them toward the person who aroused them. Thus a man may be angry at his boss but displace his anger on his wife for some trivial reason. A girl who is angry at her parents may take it out in a quarrel  with  her boy friend, or vice versa.