Psychoanalysis and Defense Mechanisms: Understanding the Unconscious

Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis is a discipline founded by Sigmund Freud, and within it, one can distinguish three levels:

• A) A research method that essentially brings evidence of the unconscious meaning of words, actions, and imaginary productions (dreams, fantasies, delusions) of an individual.
• B) A psychotherapeutic method based on this research and characterized by the interpretation of resistance, transference, and desire.
• C) A set of psychological and psychopathological theories that systematize the data provided by the psychoanalytic method of investigation and treatment.

Defense Mechanisms

Defense mechanisms are unconscious psychological strategies brought into play by various entities to cope with reality and to maintain self-image.

• Repression: Primarily used to combat sexual desires. The instinctive impulse is prevented from accessing the motor response, keeping its energy load intact. A condition of repression is essential; that the motive of displeasure acquires a power greater than the pleasure produced by satisfaction. This means a constant expenditure of energy and is, therefore, uneconomical. Any repression consists of two phases:
  • A primal repression, which keeps the psychic representation of instinct out of the field of consciousness.
  • Repression proper, which lies in the psychological ramifications of the repressed or that series of ideas that have been linked associatively to such representation.
• Regression: The process which leads again to a psychic activity form of action that is outdated, and chronologically more evolutionarily primitive than today.
• Isolation: Considered separately, it makes what really stays together stay together (obsessive neurosis).
• Cancellation or Repair: Consists in performing a particular act in order to cancel or repair the meaning of an earlier one.
• Projection: The subject attributes to an object outside their own unconscious tendencies, unacceptable to his superego, then perceiving them as characteristics of the object.
• Changing a drive by its opposite: Mutation of love into hatred.

Consumer Behavior

Consumer behavior examines how and why consumers buy and consume. This act of consumption introduces us into the world of economics, psychology, sociology, and other fields.