“The Ego and the Defense Mechanisms”:1 A Review and Discussion

In Inhibition, Symptom, and Anxiety,2 published in 1923, Sigmund Freud modified his previous conclusion that neurotic anxiety is ‘always’ a transformation of sexual energy. He defined the principle which has subsequently been accepted by psychoanalysts, that anxiety serves as a signal to the Ego of the activity of instinctual demands which have previously led to painful consequences, and he demonstrated the primary rôle of anxiety in the chain of events which end in phobias, conversion hysterias, and obsessions. This was the beginning of the special interest of psychoanalysts for the last fifteen years in those defense-mechanisms which protect the Ego from the experience of excessive anxiety, and their rôle in the normal development of the individual as well as in his pathological traits and symptoms. This work has led to Reich's3 demonstration of the rôle of reaction-formations in the development of “character”; to Franz Alexander's4 views on the need for punishment as a motive of neurotic reactions of the “total personality”; to Wälder's5 masterly paper on The Multiple-Function of the Ego; to Nünberg's6 The