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= D.: Rationalisierung.–Es.: racionalización.–Fr.: rationalisation.–I.: razionalizzazione.–P.: razionalização.
Procedure whereby the subject attempts to present an explanation that is either logically consistent or ethically acceptable for attitudes, actions, ideas, feelings, etc., whose true motives are not perceived. More specifically, we speak of the rationalisation of a symptom, of a defensive compulsion or of a reaction-formation. Rationalisation also occurs in delusional states and tends towards a more or less thoroughgoing systematisation.
This term was brought into common psycho-analytical usage by Ernest Jones in his article on ‘Rationalisation in Everyday Life’ (1908).
Rationalisation is a very common process which occurs throughout a broad field stretching from deliria to normal thought. Since any behaviour is susceptible of a rational explanation, it is often difficult to decide when such an explanation is spurious–not in what it says but in what it neglects to say. In psycho-analytic treatment, specifically, all the intermediary stages between two extremes are to be found. At one pole, it is easy to show the patient the artificiality of the motives
he claims and so to discourage him from being content with the account he has given. In other cases, on the contrary, the rational motives are especially well founded (the resistances that can be dissimulated by the ‘appeal to reality’, for example, are particularly well known to analysts); but even here it may be of use to place these motives ‘in parentheses’ in order to uncover the satisfactions or unconscious defences which are additional motivating factors.
Instances of the first type of case are furnished by rationalisations of neurotic or perverse symptoms (e.g. masculine homosexual behaviour is explained by an appeal to the male's supposed intellectual and aesthetic superiority); and of defensive compulsions (e.g. rituals associated with feeding are justified in terms of hygiene).
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