The Concept of Defense

I have attempted to indicate some of the problems involved in the conception of defense. In a restricted sense, defense is viewed as the sum of those unconscious ego activities which work toward maintaining a neurotic equilibrium and thus hinder the emergence of the transference neurosis; they tend to prevent the crystallization of the neurotic conflicts in the analytic process. Defenses are directed against instinctual drives as well as against anxiety, and those vanguards of the drives, the emotions. I have endeavored to show that the mechanisms of defense are complex entities which may involve several defensive positions, and that it is fruitful to distinguish between the deep, unconscious, automatic defense mechanisms and those located in what we called the layers of defense near the ego. Reflections concerning a differentiation of the concepts, defense and resistance, are presented with the intention of finding the sometimes elusive but nevertheless very specific nature of the concept of defense. These reflections are in accord with the current psychoanalytic endeavor to recognize with greater precision the role played by the ego in the process of defense.