brings back into the psychological and psychiatric literature the persistence, the will to live, the courage, and indeed the heroism that are as much a part of human nature as the evasions and petty impulse gratifications that bulk so large in our thinking about psychopathology (Menzies, 1960, p. 64).
The literature of coping shows the amazing resilience of humans and is a reminder that adaptive strategies lead not only to equilibrium, but also to growth.
Historically, several terms have been used more or less synonymously with coping. Selye and Lazarus have made important contributions to distinguishing and clarifying the competing and overlapping terms of adaptation, defense, coping, mastery, and problem solving. According to Selye (1976), adaptation is the master concept that subsumes all others. It is the complex of all processes that maintain an organism-environment relationship useful to the organism. Adaptation is thus a dynamic, evolving, unending process and should not be viewed as a stimulus-response situation in which people only conform to the status quo. Contemporary adaptation theories are growth-oriented and recognize human needs for novelty and creation; they are anticipatory as well as reactive (Jacobson, 1977). Defense, mastery and coping are all mechanisms or strategies by which adaptation takes place.
The concept of defense is familiar because of its prominence in psychoanalytic theory. In fact, for much of its history, coping was considered to be synonymous with the Freudian defense mechanisms occurring unconsciously or at least intrapsychically. Although the argument about whether coping is positive or negative has not been resolved, there is a recent tendency to view coping and defense as two different processes that may occur in the same person. Coping is an active, confronting process that gathers and uses new information to adjust to a changed situation (Jacobson, 1983, p. 27). Defense, on t...