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The thesis of the book, The Processes of Defense, is stated on page two, where Joseph Fernando explains, “It is a major contention of this book that the actual integration of ideas related to defenses against reality, with the older findings relating defenses against affects and drives, in order to form a more integrated theory of defense, has not occurred.” He then informs the reader that his aim is to achieve this integration and to test his ideas against clinical data.
The book is divided into three parts. The first deals with the defences of repression, denial, and externalization, as well as internalization. The second chapter focuses on trauma and dissociation, and introduces a new basic type of mental functioning that the author calls “the zero process.” Each chapter in this part contains a section on technique as it applies to the particular defence. Fernando basically posits himself as a theory creator and integrator of the ideas in the literature on defences. This second part of the book concentrates on disorders of narcissism, masochism, and the perversions in relation to how defensive structures operate in each disorder. The third part is devoted to the author's ideas about the importance of a general theory of psychoanalysis, which include an incorporation of defence theory and other theoretical contributions to our field.
Any experienced psychoanalytic clinician reading this book cannot but be impressed by the far-reaching nature of its contents. The depth of both the theoretical and clinical expositions is impressive and at times overwhelming. Fernando, in this work, is attempting the ambitious task of the first major restructuring of defence theory since Anna Freud's classic The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense, published in 1936. Although as the