Foreword

THE CONCEPT OF DEFENSE IS PART OF THE CORE of psychoanalysis. As early as 1896, Freud alluded to the psychical process of "defense" or "repression." The use of the term defense was soon temporarily suspended and replaced by repression, which was a specific and central defense mechanism and, at the same time, a rather general synonym for defense. So important was the concept of defense that even during the so-called id phase of psychoanalysis, Freud (1914) had actually declared.

The theory of repression is the corner-stone on which the whole structure of psycho-analysis rests. It is the most essential part of it …

(p. 16). The relation of repression to analytic resistance followed immediately thereafter, in the same paragraph, culminating in the characterization of psychoanalysis in terms of the phenomena of transference and resistance. The concept of defense and the parallel concept of resistance are fundamental to the evolution of psychoanalytic thought and intrinsic to the theory of technique. The importance of defense was elucidated in numerous theoretical papers, derived afresh and clinically illustrated in the case histories and other clinical examples. Gradually distinguished from related formulations of censorship and distortion, defense was differentiated from a global concept to include a number of different defense mechanisms. Freud (1926) then noted the advantages of the old concept of defense,

provided we employ it explicitly as a general designation for all the techniques which the ego makes use of in conflicts which may lead to a neurosis, while we retain the word 'repression' for the special method of defence which the