Faculty of Psychology, Sigmund Freud University, Vienna, Austria.
Institute for Lifespan Development, Family, and Culture, Department of Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences, University of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg.
Integr Psychol Behav Sci. 2020 Jun;54(2):354-369. doi: 10.1007/s12124-020-09515-6.
The concept of defense mechanism is interwoven with psychoanalytic theories of anxiety and psychic conflict. From its first formulation in 1894, its usefulness resides in the degree to which it helps to explain otherwise mysterious phenomena. Statistical approaches to the study of defense mechanisms, which have significantly increased in popularity in the past three decades, test isolated assumptions without reflection on how these are integrated into psychoanalytic theory, nor on what should be regarded as psychoanalytic data. Consequently, their results and their models have not provided useful insights into psychoanalytic theory. This paper aims to show how these issues in statistical approaches largely stem from disregarding discussions on the ontological status of defense mechanisms and the epistemological consequences linked to them. Studying defense mechanisms as they are manifested in external lifestyles, clouds the distinction between constructs (explanatory terms) and phenomena (empirical referents), which is furthermore necessary for a theoretical model to have explanatory value. Concrete examples are given regarding problems in statistical conceptualizations of defense mechanisms as well as the cursory explanations these tend to describe. Implications for future research are discussed.
防御机制的概念与精神分析理论中的焦虑和心理冲突交织在一起。从 1894 年的首次提出，它的有用性在于它在多大程度上有助于解释其他神秘现象。过去三十年来，对防御机制的统计学研究方法越来越流行，这些方法检验孤立的假设，而不考虑这些假设如何融入精神分析理论，也不考虑应该将哪些视为精神分析数据。因此，它们的结果和模型并没有为精神分析理论提供有用的见解。本文旨在表明，统计学方法中的这些问题在很大程度上源于忽视了对防御机制的本体论地位以及与之相关的认识论后果的讨论。将防御机制作为外在生活方式的表现来研究，混淆了构建（解释性术语）和现象（经验参考）之间的区别，而这种区别对于具有解释价值的理论模型是必要的。具体例子涉及到防御机制的统计学概念化中存在的问题，以及这些问题往往只是粗略的解释。讨论了对未来研究的影响。
