Defense Mechanisms and Violence toward Partners and Strangers: Defense Mechanism Manual and Defense Mechanisms Rating Scale

Violence is common in late adolescence and among college students. Late adolescence, an important time in intrapsychic development, is characterized by a shift to the use of more mature defense mechanisms (Cramer 1991). Immature defense mechanisms may not be sufficient to control aggression. We hypothesized that people with more mature defense mechanisms would use less violent means of conflict resolution with both partners and strangers.

Thirty-eight undergraduate college student men (average age 19.5 years) in beginning psychology classes made up stories about each of six cards (1, 2, 4, 6BM, 7BM, and 13MF) from the Thematic Apperception Test. The students also described six important interactions with other people, following the Relationship Anecdotes Paradigms (RAP) interview procedure (Luborsky and Crits-Christoph 1998). Each student then completed a measure of interpersonal problem solving and violence, the Conflict Tactics Scale (Straus 1979).

TAT stories and RAP interview transcripts were scored for defenses. The Defense Mechanisms Manual, or DMM (Cramer 1991), was used to score TAT responses. The DMM assesses three defense mechanisms: denial (least mature), projection (intermediate), and identification (most mature). The Defense Mechanism Rating Scale, or DMRS (Perry 1990), was used to score RAP responses. The DMRS assesses seven levels of defenses: mature, obsessional, other neurotic, minor image-distorting, disavowal, major image-distorting, and acting out. The TAT and RAP data were reliably scored by two psychoanalytic clinicians.

Results

Although participants produced an equal number of TAT stories and RAP episodes, there were fewer DMM TAT defense scores (13.4 per protocol) than DMRS defense scores (5.3 per protocol), t(37) = 9.81, p < .001. However, there were more words for the RAP narratives (1,683) than for the TAT stories (1,097), t(37) = 4.63, p < .001.