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Introduction

        Defense mechanisms are, psychologically speaking, the equivalent of a castle’s drawbridge. Defenses allow the inhabitants to “raise the bridge” and keep danger out while still being able to go about their business within the castle walls. The interesting thing about defenses is that the process is unconscious. Of course, the “foe” is not an enemy knight—it is stress and anxiety.

        The concept of defense mechanisms is one of the early and original ideas of Sigmund Freud and has been expounded and expanded by many since, including his daughter, Anna Freud (A. Freud, 1980/1936; S. Freud, 1981/1894). The list of defense mechanisms is often divided into groups, starting with an early division into mature and immature defenses. The most recent attempt, included in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV), includes over thirty separate defenses in seven categories in a proposed Defensive Functioning Scale (APA, 1994).

        Agreement as to the categorization or the number of defenses does not exist. The Defensive Functioning Scale (DFS) is included under the heading “Proposed Axes for Further Study” (APA, 1994, p. 751). The very concept and definition of defenses has been questioned (Vaillant, 1998). Although some defenses, such as denial, have entered and enriched the popular consciousness (McWilliams, 1994), that does not mean that the concept is accepted or proved. The great variety of defense mechanisms listed in the DSM-IV gives rise to many questions. What makes a defense a defense? Are there styles of interaction that could be viewed as defenses that are not currently classified as defenses or are classified as other types of behaviors? Is a defense only a defense if it is “defensively” used in the presence of stress and anxiety? Finally, if an individual knows that this behavior is serving to lessen anxiety—if it is a conscious effort—is it still a defense? And if it is not, what is it?

        This paper will examine these issues, focusing on one of the “high adaptive level” defenses, humor, as an example (APA, 1994). It seeks to gain a better understanding of current psychological thinking as expressed in relevant journals and books with the aim of illustrating the problems surrounding the various ways defense mechanisms are operationalized and conceptualized.

Literature Review

        Defense mechanisms have a long and rather tortured history. In an attempt to reconstruct how they came to be viewed today, as well as where some of the issues regarding their nature arose, this paper discusses the following: First, a brief introduction to defense mechanisms, including definitions and differing perspectives. Second, a look at some of the reasons humor has been either included or excluded as a defense mechanism. Third, the influence of the medical model on early psychology and how it influenced the field, with particular emphasis on the beginnings of the DSM. Finally, a look at the current “paradigm” of defenses, embodied by the work of George E. Vaillant and encapsulated in the DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale.

What is a Defense Mechanism?

        Denial. Displacement. Projection. These are all types of defense mechanisms that have slipped into the common language. Their use is no longer restricted to those trained in psychology. People know that individuals who refuse to acknowledge personal difficulties, particularly addictions, are in denial. People know that those who go home and “kick the dog” because the boss is not an acceptable target are displacing their anger. Even New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, not known for his interpersonal skills, is familiar enough with projection to accuse opposing Senate candidate Hillary Clinton of “projecting her own feelings onto him” (Bumiller & Nagourney, 2000). But there are many more defenses than these few, and their use is not limited to the select situations so favored by situation comedies.

        The implied intentional use of defenses (kicking the dog) is not an accurate portrayal. Conscious displacement of anger would not be a defense, for by their very definition, defenses are an unconscious process. Perry and Cooper (1989) provide an excellent description:

A defense is a psychological mechanism that mediates between an individual’s wishes, needs, affects, and impulses on the one hand, and both internalized prohibitions and external reality on the other. Defenses may operate whether emotional conflict is triggered by internal or external stressors. They are considered mechanisms only in the sense that they function without conscious effort and often follow lawful patterns in which individuals repeatedly employ the same defenses across different circumstances. (p. 444)

In simpler terms, when an individual senses the presence of anxiety or stress, whether from an internal source (thoughts or biological disturbances) or an external source (perceived or actual), defenses help to mediate that anxiety or stress until the individual can handle it (if ever!).

        None of the above descriptions, however, give any real feeling for the workings of defense mechanisms. The defense of denial, linked above to addictions, is a serious impediment to an individual’s ability to change his or her behavior. The defense of projection, jokingly (?) used by Mayor Giuliani, is also associated with extreme forms of prejudice. Although defenses may well have come out of the closet into mainstream society, they are still not well understood.

        To say that defenses “raise the drawbridge” in the face of anxiety is perhaps more apt—the individual must, at some level, feel under attack or completely overwhelmed. The unconscious nature of defenses means that the information is so stressful that the mind refuses to allow it immediately into consciousness; instead, defenses are brought into play that allow the individual to continue on “as if” nothing were wrong. The true implication of defenses is not that an individual is appropriately arrayed for the battle of life; it is that they are inappropriately prepared psychologically and must carry these weapons to help defend themselves. The fact that “individuals repeatedly employ the same defenses across different circumstances” (Perry & Cooper, 1989, p. 444) adds to the picture of a person unable to deal rationally with a wide variety of situations.

        What kind of situations could be stressful enough to cause defenses to kick in? Vaillant (1987) details the purposes defenses can serve:

1.   1.      to keep affects within bearable limits during sudden alterations in one’s emotional life,

2.   2.      to restore psychological homeostasis by postponing or deflecting sudden increases in biological drives,

3.   3.      to attain a time out to master sudden changes in self-image that cannot be immediately integrated,

4.   4.      to manage conflicts with important people, living or dead, from whom one cannot bear to take leave,

5.   5.      to resolve cognitive dissonance,

6.   6.      to adapt to sudden, unanticipated changes in external reality. (p. 465)

Does the above give a clear picture of what provokes defenses? Do the above situations require the presence of defenses, or can some individuals deal with the above without becoming “defensive”? The question of what constitutes defenses and how to identify them has been an issue since Sigmund Freud first described them.

Perspectives of Defense Mechanisms

        Although the idea that a person could deceive him or herself has existed since ancient times (Cramer, 1998b), Sigmund Freud first used the term defense about 100 years ago (S. Freud, 1981/1894). At that time, Freud was speaking only of what came to be called repression; he would later divide the defenses into projection, isolation, regression, reaction formation, undoing, and splitting (Cooper, 1998). Anna Freud expanded the list of defenses and “suggested a classification or taxonomy of defenses according to the source of anxiety (e.g., superego, external world, strength of instinctual pressures) that gives rise to them” (Cooper, 1998, p. 951). Based on her work with children she rejected a developmental approach to categorizing defenses, finding that there was no “chronological classification” (A. Freud, 1980/1936, p. 52).

        Cooper (1998), reviewing changes in the concepts of defense within psychoanalysis, finds that those contemporary thinkers who have strayed from the Freudian viewpoint see defenses as a method of enhancing or maintaining self esteem, and that rather than being a response to stress or anxiety, they “are viewed as part of a set of relational and cognitive patterns that develop in the context of close relationships with important others” (p. 949). It would seem that Anna Freud may have been on the right track in the first place, but perhaps expecting a strictly linear developmental progression, failed to see this relationship.

         Cramer (1998a), attempting to distinguish between defense mechanisms and coping skills, suggests “that the term ‘adaptational process’ be used to refer to the overarching process of responding to adversity” (p. 920). Under this umbrella, unconscious responses will be deemed defenses and conscious processes deemed coping skills. Realizing the inherent difficulties of distinguishing between conscious and unconscious, she attempts to operationalize her terms by stating that “coping strategies are carried out with the intent of managing or solving a problem situation” while defenses “may have no effect on external reality” (p. 921).

        Cramer’s distinction is important because many attempts have been made to rank defense mechanisms into hierarchies based on the assumption that some defenses are better (higher, more mature) than others (e.g., distort reality less). Some of the defenses commonly included in the mature rankings (e.g., altruism, humor, and anticipation) have been viewed as coping skills rather than defenses by some researchers (Cramer, 1998a; Vaillant, 1988, 1986). If Cramer is right, many of the hierarchies would actually consist of coping skills at the higher end and defense mechanisms at the lower end. Additionally, Cramer (1998a) reviews the literature and finds that there is no clear relationship between positive outcomes and use of coping skills rather than defense mechanisms and that under certain circumstances a little denial may be “better” than a lot of humor.

        To confound matters further, there is also the belief that “anything is usefully regarded as defensive when it functions to reduce anxiety” (Cooper, 1998, p. 951).  Cooper (1998) condenses the work of Brenner by stating that:

Brenner emphasized how certain kinds of psychic phenomena can have multiple functions, that is, that a thought, behavior, affect, or idea can serve as both a defense and/or as an expression of something else in an individual’s life. (p. 952)

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that defense mechanisms reside solely in the eye of the beholder. For a clearer understanding of the overlap between definitions, it may be useful to look at one “higher” defense, humor.

Humor as a Defense Mechanism

        Sigmund Freud, not surprisingly, was the first to classify humor as a defense, as well as the first to “rank” it higher than other types of defense. Freud (1960/1905) wrote that “[h]umour can be regarded as the highest of these defensive processes. It scorns to withdraw the ideational content bearing the distressing affect from conscious attention as repression does, and thus surmounts the automatism of defence” (p. 290). Here we have the beginnings of the difficulties of viewing humor as a defense: Freud himself, with the reference to automatism, implies that it is not a completely unconscious process. Interestingly, humor does not appear at all in Anna Freud’s classic work on the subject of defenses (1980/1936).

        Buckman (1994) states that “Freud list[ed] condensation, symbolism, displacement, and repression as the major defense mechanisms used to express humor” (p. 10). The question now becomes whether humor is a defense or a method through which other defenses are demonstrated. Should we view “kicking the dog” as a defense of its own or an expression of displacement? It is possible that since Freud included humor as a defense, no one has thought to simply remove it from the list. Anna Freud’s inclusion of a type of projection she labeled “altruistic surrender” may have set the stage for naming defenses by their expression (1980/1936).

        Vaillant (1995/1977), a strong proponent of the hierarchy of defenses, defined the defense of humor:

Overt expression of ideas and feelings without individual discomfort or immobilization and without unpleasant effect on others. Some games and playful regression come under this heading. Unlike wit, which is a form of displacement, humor lets you call a spade a spade; and humor can never be applied without some element of an “observing ego.” Like hope, humor permits one to bear and yet to focus upon what is too terrible to be borne; in contrast, wit always involves distraction; unlike schizoid fantasy, humor never excludes other people. (p. 386)

Where, if at all, is the element of the unconscious in this definition? Nowhere, perhaps, for as Vaillant would later state, “efforts…to distinguish defenses from reflexive coping mechanisms fail because the same mental mechanisms can be coping or defensive or both (1998, p. 1150). He suggests that one step towards building consensus on terms and measurements might be the adoption of the proposed axis for defensive functioning in DSM-IV. Some understanding of the history and structure of the DSM will be helpful at this point.

The Medical Model and the DSM

        Although the concept of mental illness is far from new and specific disorders and symptoms were named and discussed by members of various theoretical orientations, it remained for the American Psychiatric Association to attempt to put together a handbook that would provide a common language for the field of psychiatry, and by extension, psychology. The first version, published in 1952, simply “provided descriptions for the mental disorder categories” and the second, published in 1968, remained mostly unchanged, being brought out to coincide with the publication of eighth version of the World Health Organization’s International Classification and Diagnosis (Williams, 1996). It was not until the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual’s Third Edition (DSM-III) was published that the concept really took hold. Improvements in this version included the inclusion of diagnostic criteria, the introduction of the multiaxial assessment, an emphasis on clinical utility and a “theory free” approach (Phares & Trull, 1997; Williams, 1996).

        The changes in DSM-III reflected a desire to more accurately describe and classify mental disorders, a concept psychiatrists were well acquainted with from their physical medical training. A shared classification scheme can provide several important functions: It serves as a common language among practitioners; increases reliability (although not necessarily validity) of diagnoses; may aid in the determination of treatment options; may aid in the understanding of and research of etiology (Phares & Trull, 1997; Williams, 1996). Additionally, a “multiaxial” diagnosis would help provide a more rounded picture of the client, much like a comprehensive physical examination should bring to light not only all medical issues the patient has, but also personal factors that may impede treatment (e.g., poverty, lack of family support, illiteracy). The DSM-IV provides for five axes: Clinical disorders and other conditions that may be a focus of clinical attention; personality disorders and mental retardation; general medical conditions; psychosocial and environmental problems, and a global assessment of functioning (APA, 1994, p. 25).

        There are problems with the DSM concept of this classification scheme, foremost perhaps being the poorly chosen term “disorder” in the title. As utilitarian as the multiaxial scheme appears to be, it has not yet been proven to live up to its expectations (Williams, 1996). Moreover, the “popular” perception of diagnosis, evinced in the press and the media, stops at the first two axes, clinical disorders and personality disorders/mental retardation. The problems of labeling people with psychiatric diagnoses are legion (e.g., may end further assessment or observation, stigmatizes client, makes employment-seeking difficult), but the most pressing is that the clinician and the patient may then define the patient by his/her diagnosis (Carson, Butcher, & Mineka, 1998; Phares & Trull, 1997). Clinician’s protests that “there should be no reference to ‘a schizophrenic’ or ‘a depressive,’ but rather to ‘a person with schizophrenia,’ or someone ‘who has a depression’” (Williams, 1996) ignore the reality that when provided with a shorthand system of communication, people will use it. The question, beyond the scope of this paper, is why psychological terms did not enter the language in exactly the same way medical terms did (i.e., “He has cancer” versus “He’s a bipolar), but to deny that it has occurred it to deny reality—the definition of the defense of denial.

        In fact, diagnosing a patient may well be a form of defense. Phares and Trull (1997) warn that:

[I]f clinicians are not careful they may come to feel that classifying people is more satisfying than trying to relieve their problems…therapy can be an uncertain, time-consuming process that is often fraught with failure. But pigeonholing can be immediately rewarding: it provides a sense of closure to the classifier. Like solving crossword puzzles, it may relieve tension without having any positive social significance. (Italics mine, p. 134)

Like solving crossword puzzles? Or like a distorted perception of reality, believing that naming an illness is somehow actually related to curing it?

        Another issue that hangs like a cloud over the DSM is the question of how disorders are included in the first place. Caplan (1995), a former member of the DSM workgroups that write the manual, became an extremely outspoken critic of the decision process, fighting the inclusion of Self Defeating Personality Disorder (SDPD) in DSM-IIIR and DSM-IV on the basis that the disorder had no empirical research supporting its construct and would prove to be extremely harmful to women if improperly used. She contends that it was dropped from DSM-IV after a highly publicized sexual harassment case involving the National Institute of Mental Health in which the plaintiff had been diagnosed as having SDPD by a psychiatrist on the NIMH’s payroll. This was not the first time that a disorder was dropped for political reasons—homosexuality was excluded by vote as well (Phares & Trull, 1997). It would be hard to imagine a group with the influence to take cancer or diabetes out of medical textbooks, but then, those textbooks do fulfill the function, unlike the DSM, of suggesting empirically-based treatment alternatives.

        This background on the DSM has hopefully shown that the DSM is not quite the scientific and empirically validated work it is often presumed or presented to be and that it has not fulfilled several of the functions for which it was designed. This is important to keep in mind as the Defensive Functioning Scale is discussed.

Defensive Functioning Scale

        The Defensive Functioning Scale (DFS) is derived from the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales (Perry & Kardos, 1995; Soldz & Vaillant, 1998) and has been heavily influenced by the work of Vaillant (1987, 1995/1977), who has spent decades following several cohorts and assessing their defense mechanisms and the relation of those defenses to psychological health. Vaillant’s work has empirically shown what seems obvious in retrospect—those individuals who rely more heavily on the “higher” defenses, allowing for greater awareness of their situations, have better life outcomes, as determined by criteria such as periods of unemployment, marital status, physical health, and self-reported levels of happiness. Vaillant uses a longitudinal approach he calls triangulation: a method of using “real symptoms, autobiographical report, and contemporaneously assessed biographical fact” (2000, p. 91). His work is a fundamental restatement of what is popularly known now—those in denial are going nowhere.

        Vaillant also includes in his hierarchy some of the problematic defenses, such as humor, that are seen by others as coping skills. The DFS attempts to gloss over this issue by stating in its description that “[d]efense mechanisms (or coping styles) are automatic psychological processes that protect the individual against anxiety and from the awareness of internal or external dangers or stressors” (APA, 1994, p. 751). This is a conflation of terms that previously had discrete and exclusionary meanings. Nowhere else has the idea of coping skills implied an unconscious process; by their very nature, coping is seen to be a rational process that is often the result of being very aware of one’s situation.

        The DFS intends for the clinician to assess the client’s level of defense mechanisms and/or coping skills “employed at the time of evaluation, supplemented by whatever information is available about the individual’s defenses or coping patterns during the recent time period that preceded the evaluation” (APA, 1994, pp. 751-752). Again, Vaillant’s careful work with each client included triangulation—no assessment was made in one sitting. It would seem difficult, to say the least, to not only discern a new client’s defenses but also to rank them in their frequency of use during one interview.

        After ranking up to seven individual defenses or coping skills, the clinician moves to determine the overall defensive level used by the client.  There are seven levels, starting with the high adaptive level, which includes humor, down to the level of defensive dysregulation, in which we find defenses such as psychotic denial. In the example provided in the text, the client’s level was major image-distorting, based upon the first two defenses noted being splitting and projective identification, which are both from that level (see Appendix A). However, the remaining five defenses came from three other levels: action (acting out), minor image-distorting level (devaluation and omnipotence), and disavowal (denial and projection). Action level is one level lower than major-image distorting level. If this axis were administered like the DSM-IV’s Global Assessment of Functioning Scale (GAF, Axis V; APA, 1994, p. 32; see Appendix B), a clinician would not choose a higher level if symptoms from a lower level were present (for example, would not choose “moderate symptoms” if any mention of suicidal ideation were made).

        Another issue with the DFS is that, again unlike the GAF, no mention is made of either repeated assessments or change over time. This is mainly due to the empirical work done by Vaillant and others (e.g., Perry and Cooper, 1989) showing that patterns of defense use tends to remain relatively stable throughout an individual’s lifetime. However, there is research showing exactly the opposite. Albucher, Abelson, and Nesse (1998) found that defense use did change after patients received brief behavior therapy for obsessive compulsive disorder: use of adaptive defenses (humor, suppression, and sublimation) increased and use of one maladaptive defenses (undoing) decreased. Their findings indicate that “[m]aladaptive defenses may lead to greater symptoms, while greater symptom severity may led to the use of less mature defenses” (p. 559). In other words, there may be a chicken and egg relationship between mental health and defense use—which comes first? The ability to use higher level defenses, increasing mental health? Or the presence of mental health, allowing the individual the freedom to stay away from less adaptive defenses? This conundrum is neither discussed nor made room for in the DFS. The assumption of defense permanence is written in to the axis. The option of repeatedly assessing defenses, or attempting to determine if there has been a change in defense use, which would follow the GAF model, is not present.

        Although defenses may finally be having their moment in the sun with the possibility of having their own DSM axis, it is apparent that there are still some difficulties with how defenses are defined and evaluated. The discussion section that follows will add more fuel to the fire by introducing another perspective on the nature of defenses.

Discussion

        It is clear that defense mechanisms have been battered about on the seas of psychological change for many years. This discussion section will introduce yet another perspective, that of evolutionary psychology, in order to highlight some of the deeper conflicts inherent in designating behaviors as defenses.

A contrasting view from evolutionary psychology

        Although psychology views itself as a science (or at worst a social science), there has been a great disconnect between psychology and all other fields involved in “human” sciences (biology, biochemistry, anthropology) in that psychology has, for the most part, completely ignored the concept of evolution. Though Darwin’s The Origin of Species was published in 1859, 35 years before Freud’s first published mention of repression (Freud 1981/1894), evolutionary thought did not begin to inform psychoanalytic thinking until well into the 20^th century. This is not to say that biology or genetics were ignored; on the contrary, the nature/nurture controversy has raged through the field practically since its inception, and Freud himself was aware of the links between human and animal behavior (1960/1905). It was the idea that mental processes, not just the physical body, had been shaped by natural selection that was missing. Somehow the nurture part was seen as beginning afresh with each new infant, not realizing that adapting to one’s environment was not, in the evolutionary sense, merely a physical effort. Buss (2000) states that “[c]urrent mechanisms of mind are the end products of a selective process, a sieve through which features passed because they contributed, either directly or indirectly, to reproductive success” (p. 15).

        This is not to say that all features currently used by the human mind have been selected for and are perfect in their current function. Shapiro (1998) warns of two errors made in attributing evolutionary processes to psychology: “The first danger is that of assuming a design when no design is in fact present” (p. 253). Evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology acknowledge that some features may well be “by-products” of other features, serving no purpose of their own. Shapiro’s definition of this is “psychological junk: psychological phenomena that do not contribute to the function of the capacity under investigation” (p. 254). The second error relates to parsimony of explanation. Shapiro (1998) states:

The second danger one confronts when applying evolutionary theory to psychology concerns the inference from the nature of the task an organism performs to the structure the solution to the task must take. Care must be taken not to be unduly profligate in descriptions of the components an organism’s psychology must possess, or the stages a psychological process must pass through, in order to produce adaptive behavior. (p 255)

Although not specifically discussing defense mechanisms, the evolutionary perspectives stated can be applied if we ask what function defenses could have served that would have increased reproductive success, and whether our current conception of them is the most parsimonious explanation for the observed behaviors.

        Dixon (1998) finds that defense mechanisms are comparable to flight responses in animals. (So did Sigmund Freud, who said that “[d]efensive processes are the psychical correlative of the flight reflex” (1960/1905, pp. 289-290), but he equated defensive behavior with pathology, rather than adaptation.) This is a logical conclusion based on the fact that animals and people have a “common evolutionary past” (Dixon, 1998, p. 417) and should have some methods in common for avoiding danger. Avoiding danger would certainly contribute to reproductive success—the dead don’t reproduce. While the defenses of animals are behavioral, Dixon states that “in humans, strategies of defence also occur as mental processes, i.e. the so-called ego defence mechanisms which presumably evolved on the template of the older behavioural defence system” (p. 417).

        Flight behaviors are not only those which take the animal physically out of the area of danger. Of most interest to Dixon are the “arrested flight” behaviors, those exhibited when the animal cannot escape the aggressor, whether of the same or another species. Arrested flight is demonstrated by cut-off behaviors, which ‘cut-off’ incoming stimuli. The simplest form is merely looking away. Though this may seem inconsequential, Dixon (1998) states that:

Cut-offs are valuable means of coping with disturbing information. By reducing the perception of such disturbing stimuli, they reduce the individual’s level of arousal and enhance its chances of switching to a more appropriate behaviour when the need arises. (p. 422)

It is not hard to see the analogy with defense mechanisms, and the evolutionary link to cut-off behaviors provides a useful insight: it is a nice encapsulation of denial to think of the ostrich with its head in the sand. That picture serves to incorporate the similarities between animal and human defenses well: First, I will put my head in the sand and perhaps the aggressor/anxiety will simply go away (it can’t see me). Second, even if it doesn’t go away, I don’t have to look at it and make myself more afraid/nervous. Third, if the need arises for real action, I will have conserved my resources by not panicking too early.

Dixon (1998) notes that actual animal cut-off behaviors (e.g., looking away, looking down) are used by the mentally ill, specifically depressed and schizophrenic people, and his assumption is that this is because “their mental defenses are considered to have broken down” (p. 440). It is an interesting idea, although he does not expand upon it, to think that the “higher” defenses may in reality be all of the ego defenses we have discussed, and the “lower” may be those that are more clearly behavioral actions shared by animals and humans.

But surely evolution might have found a better way by now for the “higher” order animals to defend themselves? There is no question that a more problem-solving approach to stress or danger is to be preferred. Why then is there a proliferation of defenses that in some ways still cause us to resemble that ostrich? Nesse (1990) cuts to the chase by asking:

If distortion of reality is disadvantageous and awareness of repressed material is advantageous, why hasn’t natural selection shaped a mind that operates this way in the first place? From an evolutionary perspective, the fact of repression is a first-class mystery. (p. 267)

He answers by surmising that the distortion of reality is the goal. Self-deception can prove to be a problem-solving device that ensures stability in long-term relationships with other members of one’s social group. Based on the understanding that belonging to a social group contributes to reproductive success, it is important for the individual to moderate his/her needs with that of the group—those who do not appear to contribute or who appear too greedy may not be allowed to remain. Certainly those who prove hostile will be asked to leave. Under these conditions, it is beneficial for the individual who strongly desires to break these social rules to deceive oneself that this is not the case.

To put it more plainly, it is in one’s own best interests to kick the dog and not the boss—the boss contributes more to one’s survival. Beyond that, in order to continue to get along with the boss, there is an advantage to actually believing that you were really angry with the dog, not the boss—by deceiving yourself you present a more perfect deception to the world around you: you are not acting as if you like your boss, you believe that you do like your boss. Nesse’s point is that this is a true evolutionary advantage, not a dysfunction. Although similar to Vaillant’s concept of improved social functioning, Nesse’s concept of defensive functioning does not discriminate between higher and lower defenses, only between whether the defense used results in a greater chance of reproductive success. While this may seem to be a small point, the divide between them is extremely wide when looked at in terms of values, discussed in the next section.

Values implicit in the DFS concept of defenses

        What is most striking about the perspectives of evolutionary psychology and the DFS is that, at heart, they would appear to have the same goal—an objective assessment of functioning. The crucial difference is what each means by functioning. The DFS is mainly concerned with socially acceptable interpersonal relations, hidden under the guise of “love and work.” For example, if a man was well able to support his family but regularly defrauded others to do it, where would his defenses be assessed? Would there be a difference if this man were in car sales or con games? This is not to imply that this is an endorsement of illegal behavior, rather that the same behaviors exhibited under different social conditions might well result in different assessments. It seems to all come down to a question of value judgment, and in particular, who gets to make those judgments. Vaillant (2000) opens this Pandora’s box and leaves it open:

Defenses, no matter how ingeniously assessed, reflect value judgments about mental process, as do process concepts in physics (e.g., forward motion and velocity). All three—velocity, forward motion, and defenses—depend on the vantage point of the observer and involve processes rather than static qualities like mass or intelligence. Nevertheless, if people wish to understand their own lives in time and space, these are judgments worth making. (p. 90)

        There are many problems with this statement, the greatest of which is the attempted conflation of psychological and physical concepts to lend credence to the first. A “value” in physics, taken from this to mean “vantage point,” is not the same as either a “value” or a “vantage point” in psychology. It is true, based on a limited knowledge of physics (and slightly greater knowledge of perception), that a moving body can seem to be moving in various directions and at various speeds depending upon the positions of the observer and the body in question. However, all observers sitting in the same “vantage point” would see the same effect; there is agreement to this general phenomena, and it is taken into consideration for many different types of measurements. There is no such agreement regarding defenses, as Vaillant himself states (in the paragraph immediately preceding this one!)—not on assessment, not even on terms. Vaillant seems to have taken a few steps back (or a few forward into denial?), since only a few years earlier he wrote that “[b]ecause defenses rest in the eyes of the beholder, their identification is subject to observer countertransference and projection” (1998, p. 1148).

        The second problem stems from the first. Since the concept remains that understanding defense mechanisms involves value judgments, but the “disinterested” observer from physics has been lost along with her amoral “vantage point,” we are back to asking whose values and what values are being used? Again, Vaillant (1998) had written earlier that:

Whether we regard Fidel Castro and George Washington as fathers of their respective countries or trouble-makers illustrates the same difficulty that we have in assessing defensive behavior and deciding whether it is coping, or voluntary, or adaptive, or defensive, or involuntary, or maladaptive. Each person views personality and defenses uniquely. (p. 1148)

Evolutionary psychologists would not see an adaptive/maladaptive difference between Castro and Washington. The question, always, is whether the behaviors are serving the purposes they were selected for. In this light, we cannot see either of them as less than successful. Once again, this is not an endorsement of Castro or his repressive regime. It is an attempt to make clear, through large and emotionally charged examples, that some type of value system is further entrenched in the “science” of psychology than we would like to admit. Evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby (1999) are more honest about the difficulties of value judgments in psychology:

We only wish to point out that in understanding issues of mental disorder, health, and treatable conditions, the choice to act on some set of values as opposed to others is always necessarily a part of the process; that this choice ought not to be disguised with the pretense that only questions of fact are at issue; that the questions of whose values are prevailing and what are the nature of those values ought always to be made explicit; that a scientific account of the underlying psychological or biological situation ought to be kept separate from and undeformed by such questions of value; and that there will be an endemic and motivated temptation to confuse exactly these issues in order to spuriously “win” moral disputes under the guise that they are factual disputes. (p. 456)

The ultimate problem in assessing defenses may prove to be not whether we can discretely name and describe them, but whether we are willing to admit that socially unacceptable behaviors can also be defenses—if performing good deeds (altruism) can be a defense, why can’t performing bad deeds be one as well? And if we are not willing to have an “amoral” psychology, then shouldn’t we be more honest with ourselves and the public about what value system we have chosen?

What does all of this mean for humor?

        It is hard to believe that evolutionary psychologists would have come up with an explanation for the presence of humor, since language appeared relatively recently in our evolutionary history. However, given that current mental defenses developed on the “template” of older behavioral defenses (Dixon, 1998), it is not surprising that there are suggestions. Nesse (1990) said that the “more ‘mature’ defenses distort reality more subtly” and that:

Humor turns problematic confrontations into play so that neither party is required to compete seriously, with the risks that would entail. It is also a way of gracefully giving way without acknowledgment of inferior status. It can also be used to insult a third party subtly so as to define the in-group and out-group. (p. 281)

Again looking to similarities between humans and animals, there is a movement exhibited by dogs known as the play-bow (Rugaas, 1997). It can be an invitation to play sent to a companion, an invitation to “get to know you” to a stranger, or a calming signal. Calming signals are described as an alternate to cut-offs; Rugaas (1997) prefers the term calming signal because these behaviors are preventing something rather than interrupting them:

These signals are used at an early state to prevent things from happening, avoiding threats

from people and dogs, calming down nervousness, fear, noise, and unpleasant things. The signals are used for calming themselves when they feel stressed or uneasy. The signals are used to make the others involved feel safer and understand the goodwill the signals tell about. They are used to make friends with other dogs and people. (p. 1)

What is most interesting is that not all dogs have the ability to communicate in this way, whether through improper socialization as puppies or through abuse and neglect. In an interesting parallel to the work of Albucher, Abelson, and Nesse (1998), Rugaas states that these skills can be taught, that dogs can learn the signals necessary to communicate in a “mature” manner with their own species. Surely if they can there is hope for us?

        Insofar as humor is concerned, the debate is open (or has perhaps not even yet begun in earnest) as to whether it is a defense, a coping skill, or a “play bow.” It may well be that it is all of these things, for in the end, we are unable to make a “scientific” decision as to whether any given behavior is consciously or unconsciously motivated, or whether it is some combination of both, and since to a great extent that is how we have structured our definitions of defenses and coping skills, we may be doomed to an irresolvable, endless debate. Nesse (1990) considers the possibility that we may never figure ourselves out, since our minds have been “shaped by natural selection to be impenetrable to others, and, therefore, to ourselves. No wonder psychology is so infernally complicated” (pp. 283-284). Perhaps we are more like those who comfort themselves by making an elaborate diagnosis as a defense in the face of difficult treatment options than we would care to admit—maybe it is easier to try to understand ourselves than to change ourselves? Could psychology itself….be a defense?

Future Considerations

        There is an anecdote about several blind men being introduced to an elephant. The first grabs the trunk and says an elephant is like a rope. The second touches the elephant’s side with his arms wide and says that it is like a wall. The third puts his arms around a leg and says the elephant is like a tree. Like the elephant touched by the blind men, defenses have been looked at from various angles. In much the same way, individuals have been looked at under the “medical model” of psychiatry and psychology as a collection of symptoms, not as unique individuals. Through an analysis of defense mechanisms and the example of humor as a defense in particular, this paper hopefully demonstrated that an integrated picture of human functioning has been missing from the study of defenses, and by implication, quite possibly from psychology as a whole.

        The greatest implication of evolutionary psychology to this researcher is the understanding that evolution continues in spite of our attempt to view ourselves as fully “evolved” creatures. The idea that humans have moved beyond evolution is laughable when viewed in evolutionary time, since the idea itself has been proposed and discussed in a millisecond of our history. Psychology needs to rid itself of the Panglossian “best of all possible worlds” philosophy and realize that the human mind is still in the process of change, that to deem certain behaviors “good” in the moral sense or in the psychologically healthy sense is to ignore the true “nature” in the nature/nurture debate. We must begin to acknowledge more openly that in many ways, the practice of psychology in the psychodynamic sense is more a philosophy than a science and work to integrate true scientific thinking into the field.

        One issue that clearly needs to be addressed is how advances in different areas of psychology are integrated into each other. Although evolutionary psychology is making inroads into academic journals (e.g., D. M. Buss’s “The evolution of happiness” in the American Psychologist (2000); the special section in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology titled “The concept of evolutionary disorder: Evolutionary analysis and critique” (1999); and the special issue of the British Journal of Medical Psychology titled “Evolutionary approaches to psychopathology” (1998)), it would seem that any given psychologist could easily miss much new information simply by subscribing to the wrong journals or not attending the right conferences. Unlike other professions, such as accounting, in which a tax code change in New York may not affect any but those in New York, advances in psychology affect all practitioners to some degree. The flow of information must somehow be made more easily accessible, so that a general understanding of new ideas can be reached without bankrupting oneself with journal subscriptions. Surely this field should be able to come up with a better way to get information from one brain to the next?

        Another issue that has been raised is the concept of diagnosis. At the undergraduate level, very little attention is given to discussion of the problems inherent in psychiatric diagnosis, unless the professor is personally interested in this subject. While textbooks on abnormal psychology may well include a brief section on these issues, they then spend the rest of their several hundred pages of text discussing the nature of disorders, the research done on those disorders, and the current treatments in use. The focus is on the spectrum of moderate to severe pathology, or perhaps normal to abnormal behaviors, with an implicit assumption that these pathologies and behaviors require treatment, even though there may be none in current use that seem effective. There is a world of difference between a physician who must say to a patient “I am very sorry but the type of cancer you have is currently untreatable” and a psychologist who says “I am very sorry but the type of defense mechanisms you use indicate that you will have poor life outcomes.” It is difficult to imagine what purpose the proposed Axis VI will serve other than to further expose clients to the scrutiny of insurance companies. A better understanding of the limits of psychiatric diagnosis needs to be more deeply imbedded in psychology classes and disclosed to the general public.

        Finally, it may be time to consider renaming defense mechanisms. These mechanisms, whether conscious or unconscious, defensive or coping, are all merely ways of protecting the self and allowing it to interact with the world. While the first analogy that comes to mind is the cell wall maintaining homeostasis within the cell, perhaps we should begin to move away from the biological comparisons. Maybe it is better to look at defenses as surge protectors for the mind (computer), allowing energy (stimuli) to enter and exit in an even flow, smoothing out the spikes and protecting the hardware from shorting out. The nicest part about this analogy is that there is no pathology involved—it is understood that energy must flow for the computer to function and that at times there is too much energy for the computer to handle by itself. If the surge protector can handle it, fine; if not, it may be time for an upgrade—of the computer or of the surge protector. This is how I would prefer to view defenses—as versions of surge protectors, some of which can handle more energy than others, some of which do a better job of regulating the energy flow, but all of which serve a vital function. Doesn’t your computer have one?

References

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Bumiller, E. & Nagourney, A. (2000, March 22). Giuliani asserts Mrs. Clinton is the one polarizing the city. The New York Times, pp. A1, B6.

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