Defences of the Self in a Pre-Adolescent Boy*

I should like to discuss the early, primitive defences that I came up against in the treatment of a boy whom I saw for analysis when he was 10 to 12 years of age. I came to understand these as his defences of the self, defences of a kind that presented a particular difficulty in the analytic work. So far in the development of a working model of the psyche, we have, broadly speaking, two main categories of defence: ego defences, and the primitive infantile defences that underlie them. The ego defences were delineated by Freud and further elaborated by Anna Freud in The Ego and Mechanisms of Defence (A. Freud, 1937); they include regression, repression, reaction-formation, isolation, undoing, projection, introjection, turning against the self and reversal. Klein distinguished a sub-group of more primitive defence mechanisms used against early infantile anxieties of a psychotic nature, such as fear of death by falling to pieces (disintegration) or being crushed by annihilating forces. These are splitting, idealization, denial, and projective and introjective identification. It is these primitive defences that Fordham explores in his paper Defences of the self where he writes that, “in the case of part objects there is no unconsciousness, but rather more or less violent attempts to attack and do away with the bad object - they can reach a level at which one must speak in terms of annihilation. It is in this area that total defences are mobilized” Fordham, (1974, p. 153). Fordham has called these total defences “defences of the self” and the difference between Klein's primitive infantile defences and Fordham's defences of the self is quantitative: defences of the self are more extreme, they are total. A definition by Lambert is helpful here.

Although the distinction is by no means absolute, it is still possible to distinguish between a kind of half-blind defence against annihilation of the personality as such and defences that are involved in protecting the eg