Defence Mechanism

Defenses

When you are in a situation where there is an incongruity between your image of yourself and your immediate experience of yourself (i.e. between the ideal and the real self), you are in a threatening situation. For example, if you have been taught to feel unworthy if you do not get A's on all your tests, and yet you aren't really all that great a student, then situations such as tests are going to bring that incongruity to light -- tests will be very threatening.

When you are expecting a threatening situation, you will feel anxiety. Anxiety is a signal indicating that there is trouble ahead, that you should avoid the situation! One way to avoid the situation, of course, is to pick yourself up and run for the hills. Since that is not usually an option in life, instead of running physically, we run psychologically, by using defenses.

Rogers' idea of defenses is very similar to Freud's, except that Rogers considers everything from a perceptual point-of-view, so that even memories and impulses are thought of as perceptions. Fortunately for us, he has only two defenses: denial and perceptual distortion.

Denial means very much what it does in Freud's system: You block out the threatening situation altogether. An example might be the person who never picks up his test or asks about test results, so he doesn't have to face poor grades (at least for now!). Denial for Rogers does also include what Freud called repression: If keeping a memory or an impulse out of your awareness -- refuse to perceive it -- you may be able to avoid (again, for now!) a threatening situation.

Perceptual distortion is a matter of reinterpreting the situation so that it appears less threatening. It is very similar to Freud's rationalization. A student that is threatened by tests and grades may, for example, blame the professor for poor teaching, trick questions, bad attitude, or whatever. The fact that sometimes professors are poor teachers, write trick questions, and have bad attitudes only makes the distortion work better: If it could be true, then maybe it really was true! It can also be much more obviously perceptual, such as when the person misreads his grade as better than it is.

Unfortunately for the poor neurotic (and, in fact, most of us), every time he or she uses a defense, they put a greater distance between the real and the ideal. They become ever more incongruous, and find themselves in more and more threatening situations, develop greater and greater levels of anxiety, and use more and more defenses.... It becomes a vicious cycle that the person eventually is unable to get out of, at least on their own.

Rogers also has a partial explanation for psychosis: Psychosis occurs when a person's defense are overwhelmed, and their sense of self becomes "shattered" into little disconnected pieces. His behavior likewise has little consistency to it. We see him as having "psychotic breaks" -- episodes of bizarre behavior. His words may make little sense. His emotions may be inappropriate. He may lose the ability to differentiate self and non-self, and become disoriented and passive.

The fully-functioning person

Rogers, like Maslow, is just as interested in describing the healthy person. His term is "fully-functioning," and involves the following qualities:

1. Openness to experience. This is the opposite of defensiveness. It is the accurate perception of one's experiences in the world, including one's feelings. It also means being able to accept reality, again including one's feelings. Feelings are such an important part of openness because they convey organismic valuing. If you cannot be open to your feelings, you cannot be open to acualization. The hard part, of course, is distinguishing real feelings from the anxieties brought on by conditions of worth.

2. Existential living. This is living in the here-and-now. Rogers, as a part of getting in touch with reality, insists that we not live in the past or the future -- the one is gone, and the other isn't anything at all, yet! The present is the only reality we have. Mind you, that doesn't mean we shouldn't remember and learn from our past. Neither does it mean we shouldn't plan or even day-dream about the future. Just recognize these things for what they are: memories and dreams, which we are experiencing here in the present.

3. Organismic trusting. We should allow ourselves to be guided by the organismic valuing process. We should trust ourselves, do what feels right, what comes natural. This, as I'm sure you realize, has become a major sticking point in Rogers' theory. People say, sure, do what comes natural -- if you are a sadist, hurt people; if you are a masochist, hurt yourself; if the drugs or alcohol make you happy, go for it; if you are depressed, kill yourself.... This certainly doesn't sound like great advice. In fact, many of the excesses of the sixties and seventies were blamed on this attitude. But keep in mind that Rogers meant trust your real self, and you can only know what your real self has to say if you are open to experience and living existentially! In other words, organismic trusting assumes you are in contact with the acutalizing tendency.

4. Experiential freedom. Rogers felt that it was irrelevant whether or not people really had free will. We feel very much as if we do. This is not to say, of course, that we are free to do anything at all: We are surrounded by a deterministic universe, so that, flap my arms as much as I like, I will not fly like Superman. It means that we feel free when choices are available to us. Rogers says that the fully-functioning