The List of Defense Mechanisms

Defense mechanisms are your mind’s automatic safety features. When an experience, thought, or feeling threatens to overwhelm you—like a sudden blinding glare while you’re driving—these mental reflexes flick on in the background. They dim the emotional brightness just enough to keep you steady so you can stay on the road of daily life. Most of the time the switch is flipped without your even noticing; you simply find yourself cracking a joke, changing the subject, or picturing a happier outcome. Those moves are your psyche’s way of protecting you from an emotional overload.

Nancy McWilliams is an American clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. Over decades of teaching, supervising, and writing—most famously in her book Psychoanalytic Diagnosis—she has become one of the clearest translators of complex psychodynamic ideas for therapists and students around the world. Colleagues often turn to her work because it blends deep scholarship with plain-spoken examples and genuine compassion for real people’s struggles.

McWilliams arranges defense mechanisms on a kind of developmental ladder. At the bottom are the earliest, bluntest tactics toddlers and very distressed adults may use—total denial of a problem or imagining they have magical control over everything. In the middle are the everyday coping styles most of us recognize, like shifting our irritation from the boss to the dog or burying a painful memory until we can face it later. At the top are the mature maneuvers—humor, forward planning, helping others—that let us acknowledge reality while managing our feelings gracefully. Everyone uses a mix from every step; what matters is which rung you stand on most of the time and whether you can climb to a higher one when life turns up the heat.

Clinically, McWilliams cautions that the usefulness or danger of any given defense hinges on two things: the person’s overall level of personality integration and the immediate context. A retreat that is restorative one day could be a psychotic break the next; what matters is flexibility, reality testing, and whether the person can shift to more mature options when stressed.

McWilliams lays out the defenses on a three-tier developmental ladder: primary or “primitive” defenses (typical when reality testing is shaky, as in psychotic, borderline, or very fragile narcissistic personality structures), secondary or neurotic-level defenses (the everyday coping styles of the classic hysteric, obsessive, or depressive profiles), and mature or high-adaptive defenses (strategies that protect feeling while leaving reality intact, like humor, anticipation, and sublimation). She stresses that everyone uses defenses from every tier, but clinical attention goes to which stratum predominates, how flexibly a person can shift upward under stress, and whether the same maneuver is adaptive or risky in its context. With that map in mind, here is the roster of defenses, moving from the earliest and most reality-distorting to the most reality-embracing.

Primary / “Primitive” Defensive Processes

Autistic (schizoid) withdrawal / fantasy - Retreat into an inner world that feels safer than outer reality.

Denial - Erase a piece of external or internal reality as if it does not exist.

Omnipotent control - Act or fantasise as though one’s wishes can magically dictate reality.

Primitive idealisation & devaluation - Split perceptions of self/other into “all-good” or “all-bad,” with sudden flips.

Projection - Disown an impulse or affect and attribute it to someone else.

Projective identification - Evoke, coerce, or “recruit” the disowned feeling in the other person.

Splitting - Keep contradictory self- or object representations apart, preventing integration.

Dissociation - Automatic detachment of experience from awareness (up to psychotic levels).

Acting-out - Discharge conflict by behaviour rather than symbolisation or awareness.

Somatization - Convert conflict or affect into bodily symptoms.

Secondary / “Neurotic-Level” Defenses

Repression - Keep an idea, memory, or affect out of consciousness.

Regression - Retreat to an earlier developmental mode of thinking or relating.

Isolation of affect / compartmentalisation - Separate ideas from the feelings attached to them.

Intellectualisation - Replace feeling with abstract, excessively cognitive rumination.

Rationalisation - Invent plausible but self-serving explanations for motives or actions.

Displacement - Shift an impulse from an unsafe target to a safer one.

Reaction formation - Transform an unacceptable impulse into its opposite.

Reversal (turning against self / passive-into-active) - Change who is active or passive, giver or receiver, in a conflict.

Undoing - Perform an action meant to magically cancel out or atone for another.

Sexualisation - Endow an issue with erotic meaning to gain distance from its real impact.

Mature / “High-Adaptive” Defenses

Anticipation - Experience future discomfort in fantasy in order to prepare for it realistically.

Suppression - Consciously defer an impulse or thought without repressing it.

Humor - Point to the incongruous aspects of a conflict, sharing the joke with others.

Sublimation - Channel the energy of an unacceptable impulse into a socially valued aim.

Altruism - Derive gratification from meeting other people’s needs.

Affiliation - Turn to others for help or support rather than distorting the issue internally.

Self-assertion - Directly express thoughts and needs without aggression or manipulation.

Self-observation - Reflect on—and sometimes gently laugh at—one’s own motives and behaviour.

Asceticism - Manage conflict by voluntarily renouncing pleasurable experiences.

Task-orientation - Convert affective turmoil into constructive problem-solving activity.

Think of this catalogue less as a moral scorecard and more as a weather report on your inner climate. Everybody will dip into the “primitive” or “neurotic” zones under heavy stress; what distinguishes psychological health is flexibility—the capacity to notice what you are doing, reality-check the situation, and reach for a higher-rung option when you’re ready. That act of naming turns an unconscious shield into information you can think about and, if you wish, revise. The “developmental ladder” model reminds us that dipping into “primitive” or “neurotic” territory is simply what minds do when they feel swamped; psychological health rests on flexibility: the capacity to notice where you are on the ladder, reality-check the situation, and reach for a higher-rung option when the heat dies down.

Growth starts with gentle curiosity rather than judgment: “What might this maneuver be protecting me from right now?” Pausing, breathing, and grounding your senses widens the window of tolerance so you can bear a bit more feeling without warping reality. From there you experiment with an incremental upgrade—moving, say, from denial to conscious suppression (“I’ll deal with it after lunch”) or from projection to self-observation (“Could that trait also be mine?”). Enlisting trusted friends, a partner, or a therapist to mirror back what they see accelerates the shift, and writing about or otherwise making meaning of the new experience begins to lock the higher-level defense in place. In conversation, the same principles apply: create safety with calm body language, own your process aloud (“I notice I’m getting defensive”), allow a brief silence so primitive impulses cool, validate whatever kernel of truth you can find, and keep explanations concise so they don’t morph into rationalization. If you discover you’re chronically stuck in rigid splitting, acting-out, or dissociation that harms work or relationships, treat that not as failure but as a signal that professional help could widen your coping bandwidth.

The single most crucial point is this: defenses are normal, automatic safety features—not flaws—and mental wellness hinges on how flexibly you can notice them and trade them up when circumstances allow. If you can catch yourself slipping into a blunt, reality-warping maneuver and consciously reach for a higher-rung alternative—even just one step up—you’re already converting unconscious reflex into deliberate, growth-minded coping.