“D” is for Defense Mechanism

These categories can help you develop and dimensionalize characters – and to help shape storylines – in any kind of fiction. Of course, it made me proud that my favorite personal defense mechanism is Humor, which is considered a ‘Mature’ defense.

28 Defense Mechanisms

Adapted from Adaptation to Life by George Vaillant

Based on The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense by Anna Freud

Mature Defenses

• Altruism
• Anticipation
• Asceticism
• Humor
• Sublimation
• Suppression

Narcissistic Defenses

• Denial
• Distortion
• Projection

Immature Defenses

• Acting out
• Blocking
• Hypochondriasis
• Introjection
• Passive-aggressive
• Regression
• Schizoid fantasy
• Somatization

Neurotic Defenses

• Controlling
• Displacement
• Externalization
• Inhibition
• Intellectualization
• Isolation
• Rationalization
• Dissociation
• Reaction Formation
• Repression
• Sexualization

This is just one of hundreds of articles and thousands of links in “Miller’s Compendium of Timeless Tools for the Modern Writer” – a comprehensive catalog of writing resources.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Enter your comment here...

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Email (required) (Address never made public)

Name (required)

Website

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

You are commenting using your Google account. ( Log Out /  Change )

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

Notify me of new comments via email.