Denial

Denial is the term used in psychoanalysis to describe a defense mechanism that supports splitting or splitting defense, that is, the reactivation of an early childhood psychological state. The interaction of these two primitive defense mechanisms causes negative aspects of the self or the environment not to be integrated with the corresponding positive aspects. In addition to denial, this group of mostly unconscious coping and compensatory mechanisms also includes devaluation and idealization, projective identification, introjection, and immature projection.

Denial can be used to ignore the perception of real sensations and their meaning for the individual. In this way, threatening pieces of external reality can be recognized as non-existent (or replaced by wish-fulfilling fantasies). Denial is thus the inner-psychic equivalent of averting one's gaze from a source of danger. This mechanism enables the individual to withdraw conscious or preconscious threatening content from consciousness on an emergency basis. Defense by denial is thus a spontaneously deployable protective response by which the person can withdraw attention, even reality status, from an unpleasant truth. However, denial cannot accomplish the process of a permanent transfer of aversive psychic contents into the unconscious. For this purpose, the ego has at its disposal the defense mechanism of repression, which can permanently shift unpleasant ideas into the unconscious.

Another difference between these two defense mechanisms is that repression, as a coping process, is directed against specific content (for example, unacceptable aggressive or libidinous urges), whereas denial, as a spontaneous protective response, blocks out broader segments of reality. As a result, denial interferes more than repression with logical thought processes, emotional feeling, empathy, and reality testing. As a result, moreover, an individual's ability to learn may be impaired in areas that are repeatedly subject to denial because memories cannot be built on this blanked-out content.

Even more hermetically than through denial and repression, unpleasant demands can be kept away from consciousness through avoidance. These three defense mechanisms thus form a continuum in terms of their effectiveness, whereby denial can be rated as the most unstable and least specific form of keeping aversive contents unconscious.

Genesis

Like the other primitive defense mechanisms, denial also belongs originally to the repertoire of early childhood defenses. Even with an already intact reality check in stressful situations, the child's ego has the possibility of treating unpleasant or threatening aspects of external reality as if they did not exist. In this way, the still unstable psyche of the child can protect itself from overly traumatic impressions, at least temporarily. A prerequisite for this important mechanism is the ability of the immature individual to reduce, in a regressive movement, the abstract mental structures (feelings or conceptual ideas) that are just beginning to emerge to concretistic object representations of the kind that prevailed at an earlier stage of development. This regression may make sense because at this earlier stage external and internal objects were still treated in the same way, although here it was already possible to distinguish between self and objects. Put simply, at this stage feelings and ideas had a concrete object quality. Thus, when confronted with a threat (for example, an abusive mother), the child may regress to the earlier developmental stage and internally psychologically ignore the threatening object "mother" that is thereby desymbolized. This can temporarily avert damage to the child's psyche, even if the price for this is the fading out of a piece of reality (cf. identification with the aggressor).

In the case of a pathological development of the self in this early developmental phase, for example due to persistent traumatic influences, the defense of denial to maintain a strict division of the object world and the self-image into positive and negative areas is maintained even in adulthood under specific stresses. In the course of this, a strikingly frequent regressive desymbolization of psychic contents can be observed in such individuals, presumably so that sufficient concretistic material of denial is always available. Finally, a persistence of splitting and denial as preferred defense mechanisms causes contradiction as such to be predominantly intolerable. This is especially the case when the more mature defense mechanism of repression, which does not keep ambivalence as such but specific conflicts out of consciousness, is only deficiently developed.

Denial in everyday life

A use of denial defense that is not to be considered pathological can also be observed in adults, for example in the form of denial that no serious accidents or violent crimes will happen to oneself ("Nothing like that will happen to me"). In addition, daydreaming as well as the activity of playing show similarities with the function of denial. All these examples, mind you, are not phenomena of repression, because the elements excluded from consciousness in each case are, unlike in repression, in principle and at all times conscious. Systematic gaps in memory, frequent regression to concretistic conceptions of objects, and a marked changeability of affects, on the other hand, are indicative of a fixed use of defense against denial.