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Part II of Anna Freud's book is entitled ‘Examples of the Avoidance of Objective Unpleasure and Objective Danger’, with the subtitle ‘Preliminary Stages of Defence’. Chapter 6, ‘Denial in Fantasy’, is the first of three chapters in this Part. Anna Freud begins the chapter by pointing out that the methods of defence so far discovered all function to help the ego in its struggle with the instincts, and are motivated by instinctual anxiety, objective anxiety and superego anxiety. In addition ‘the mere struggle of conflicting impulses suffices to set the defence mechanisms in motion’ (73, 69)1 In all conflict (whether with id, superego or external world) the ego attempts to repudiate a part of its own id, but what varies in this situation are the motives for the ego's defensive activities. All such defensive measures are ultimately directed towards making the ego safe and to protecting it from experiencing unpleasure. This unpleasure not only arises from threatening drive stimuli, but also from sources in the external world. The more the external world is a source of pleasure and interest, the more possibility there is of unpleasure arising from it. Because of the ego's immaturity and dependence on the external world, it tries in many ways to protect itself against the unpleasure and the dangers which can arise from it.
From the point of view of the psychoanalysis of the neuroses, attention has in the past been directed predominantly