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The authors offer examples of behavioral, physiological, and psychological protective reflexes whose adaptive function is to avoid pain and injury, thus defending the organism against danger and ensuring survival; the examples range from the molecular to sign-mediated levels of behavior. The word 'defense' is potentially ambiguous.
Several kinds of defenses are distinguished. Intraorganic defenses are homeostatic mechanisms operating unconsciously and in a sense nonpurposively; the product of evolution, heredity, maturation with learning playing a minor role, though some may be conditioned. These mechanisms are mostly innate, and are necessary for survival. Defenses involving overt behavior are adaptive and are often consciously directed. Intrapsychic defenses are mostly ego defense mechanisms which are involuntary and work quickly, automatically, and unconsciously. They often appear to be unlearned. Different personality types use different mechanisms. Culture patterns influence choice of ego defenses and their expression. Ego defense mechanisms are purposive in that they operate preconsciously to block emerging guilt and conscious anxiety; they mitigate, blot out, and create barriers against impulses, sensations, ideas, and ensure that associatively linked clusters of meaning are not cognitively grasped. Basically the defense mechanism operates by the ego's unconsciously altering its own process of perceiving, signfunctioning, and interpreting.
Intraorganic defenses require mere causal relations for their operation; overt behavioral defenses require means-end relations which presuppose causal relations plus certain additions; intrapsychic defenses require the further addition of self-reflexive, sign-mediated, and sign-altering processes. Intraorganic and overt behavioral defenses are directly concerned with altering existing conditions of experience; ego defense mechanisms, operating in the intrapsychic sphere, are concerned with the implications of exper