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This book deals with one particular problem that is with the ways and means by which the ego wards off unpleasure and anxiety, and exercises control over impulsive behavior, affects, and instinctive urges. It is a major contribution to psychoanalytic psychology.
List of contents
Foreword to the 1966 Edition -- Translator’s Note -- Theory of the Mechanisms of Defense -- The Ego as the Seat of Observation -- The Application of Analytic Technique to the Study of the Psychic Institutions -- The Ego’s Defensive Operations Considered as an Object of Analysis -- The Mechanisms of Defense -- Orientation of the Processes of Defense According to the Source of Anxiety and Danger -- Examples of the Avoidance of Objective Unpleasure and Objective Danger -- Denial in Fantasy -- Denial in Word and Act -- Restriction of the Ego -- Examples of Two Types of Defense -- Identification with the Aggressor -- A Form of Altruism -- Defense Motivated by Fear of the Strength of the Instincts -- The Ego and the Id at Puberty -- Instinctual Anxiety During Puberty -- Conclusion
About the author
Anna Freud, the youngest of Sigmund Freud's six children, and the only one to make her career in psychoanalysis, was born in Vienna on 3 December 1895. Starting her professional life as a schoolteacher, she became a member of the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society in 1922. She maintained a lifelong interest in education, and her extensive contributions in this field were matched by those in all aspects of family law, pediatrics, as well as psychoanalytic psychology, normal and abnormal. Her work in Vienna was brought to an end by the Nazi occupation and she found sanctuary in London with her parents in 1938. Her father died in the following year, but Anna Freud maintained the tradition he began in her work as a member of the British Psycho-Analytical Society and as the founder of the Hampstead Child Therapy Clinic - now the Anna Freud Centre. Her services to psychoanalysis were recognized by the award of the CBE in 1967 and by a large number of honorary doctorates on both sides of the Atlantic, including as a gesture of reparation, an honorary MD from the University of Vienna. She died on 9 October 1982.
