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Personality
Published in Mohamed Ahmed Abd El-Hay, Understanding Psychology for Medicine and Nursing, 2019
Personality characteristics results from:Fixation: this refers to conflicts or concerns that persist beyond the developmental period in which they first occur.Defense mechanisms: these are unconscious strategies that people use to reduce anxiety by concealing its source from themselves and others.
Fighting for Your Life
Published in Shamit Kadosh, Asaf Rolef Ben-Shahar, Incorporating Psychotherapeutic Concepts and Interventions Within Medicine, 2019
Shamit Kadosh, Asaf Rolef Ben-Shahar
A defence mechanism is an unconscious psychological mechanism that alters veridical perception and functions to reduce excessive anxiety. This is not a pathological response; we all do it. An adverse reaction to pain is a hallmark of any living organism. Yet while defence mechanisms are an essential part of the normal human mind, they might also result in undesirable consequences depending on the frequency and intensity of their use (Freud, 1936; Lowenstein, 1967). Responding to a physical attack by running away or attacking back could save our lives, responding similarly to arguing with our partner, when the same biological functions are triggered, might not be as useful.
Beyond Balint: support, learning and development
Published in Gerhard Wilke, Simon Freeman, How to be a Good Enough GP, 2018
As a supervisor I tried to help these GPs cope better with the changes in primary care by opening the psychological boundary between the worlds of the doctor and the health manager. It was also important to me to revisit the taken-for-granted relationship between doctor and patient and explore how the one-to-one and the group dimensions related. In the unconscious mind of a GP the patient is the object of death, illness and misfortune and the doctor is in a state of health, eternal youth and immortality. Anton Obholzer (Obholzer and Roberts, 1994) has pointed out that there is a parallel between psychic processes in the individual and institutions. He says that the unconscious mind does not have a concept of health; instead it has a deep sense of death. To defend against our constant anxiety about mortality we develop psychological defence mechanisms. One of these is to pervert the health service in our minds into a keep-death-at-bay service. From a psychic point of view, therefore, doctors in a PCG and their separate primary care teams are a continuation-of-life service. In our predominantly narcissistic age primary care is expected to keep all the patients ageless and invulnerable and protect them from any change to the self-ideal of the designer healthy person (Lasch, 1979).
Appreciating the Role of the Unconscious in Situations of Patient Ambivalence
Published in The American Journal of Bioethics, 2022
Michael James Redinger, Razvan Popescu
Let us reconsider a clinical example used in the target article by highlighting the possible role of defense mechanisms in a situation of true patient ambivalence. For background, defense mechanisms are mental tools that protect against unpleasant emotions (Gabbard 2014). They have been traditionally categorized by their perceived level of maturity based on their contribution to psychosocial dysfunction. The classical categorization divides defenses along a spectrum into mature, neurotic, and immature defenses and these defenses are deployed by patients during times of psychological stress, often unconsciously. More mature defenses allow the patient to emotionally process and adapt to stressors without distortion of the situation or internal or external conflict. Less mature defenses are those that share a characteristic inability to acknowledge distress and, as a result of subsequent distortion of self-image or reality, contribute to less effective behavior in response. These defenses are often deployed reflexively and are influenced by unconscious desires, beliefs, and conflicts. Regardless of how psychologically healthy or mature an individual may be, there are times and circumstances during which immature defense mechanisms may be deployed. The appearance of ambivalence will likely be more present when one engages neurotic and/or immature defenses as ambivalence has been psychoanalytically understood as the result of conflict between the conscious will and repressed unconscious desires.
Surviving Being Black and a Clinician During a Dual Pandemic:Personal and Professional Challenges in a Disease and Racial Crisis
Published in Smith College Studies in Social Work, 2020
Allen E. Lipscomb, Wendy Ashley
However, while virtual and digital platforms are essential to the access and implementation of mental health service provision, the internet is also a source of large amounts of inaccurate and often inconsistent information. The anxiety generated by this “infodemic” exacerbates uncertainty within already at-risk populations (Fiorillo & Gorwood, 2020). Anxiety serves a purpose; in this context it is an adaptive defense mechanism and prepares people for threat or danger. The biological processes involved in responding to threat are fundamental for survival, however, chronic or disproportionate fear is harmful and contributes to the development of psychiatric disorders (Ornell, Schuch, Sordi, & Kessler, 2020). While many people feel increasingly afraid of the coronavirus that initiated a global quarantine, stay-at-home orders for much of the United States, and a new culture of mask wearing, this level of anxiety may manifest in the form of panic that is both intrusive and debilitating. Further, in addition to anticipated or feared loss, many people are also losing loved ones, and having to grieve their loved ones that (given the circumstances of COVID) they are not able to memorialize.
Hypnotic Ego-strengthening: Where We’ve Been and the Road Ahead
Published in American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 2020
The psychoanalytic definition of the ego, going back to Freud, (1961), defined the ego as “a coherent organization of mental processes to which consciousness is attached”. He believed that, “the ego controls the approaches to motility, that is, to the discharge of excitations into the external world; it is the mental agency which supervises all its own constituent processes … ” It brings the influence of the external world and substitutes the reality principle for the pleasure principle of the id. Perception is to the ego as instinct is to the id, with the ego representing reason while the id contains the passions. The ego employs the defense mechanisms to ward off threatening affect. The ego functions, i.e. it perceives, thinks, acts, etc., and is the organizer of experience. The task of psychoanalysis is to increase the efficiency of the ego in internal mediation and to enhance its effectiveness in the world. So, ego-strengthening from a classical Freudian viewpoint extends the sphere and control of the ego over the id and superego (Freud, 1964a, 1964b).