Psychological Mechanisms of Adjustment
In attempting to adapt to the demands of everyday life psychoanalytic theories has for decades suggested that individuals rely upon mechanisms of adjustment. The two dominant forms of mechanisms of adjustment are the defense mechanism and the escape mechanism. These two forms of adjustment account for a majority of the ways in which individuals modify their behavior as triggered by the stress and trauma which they daily encounter in their environments. According to the American Psychiatric Association's latest updates as issued in the Diagnosis Statistical Manual IV Sourcebook, mechanisms of adjustment enable individuals to cope with modern life's high degrees of unusual stress (Strain, 1996, p. 1039). This brief overview will highlight how the ego constructs reliable methods for defending itself against surgings of what feels like unreasonable levels of attack. Although these initial expressions of ego adjustment can at first prove effective over time they deteriorate into habitual and even tyrannizing responses.
Defense mechanisms manifest themselves as strategies developed by the ego to protect itself against information which it would rather not process a) fully; b) immediately; c) or at any time in the near future. As Freud suggested "this effortless and regular avoidance . . . of anything that had once been distressing affords us the prototype of repression" (Freud in Goleman, 1985, p. 118). Goleman characterizes this central strategy of defense mechanisms as "ostrich"-like behavior but does concede that it is readily apparent "in the normal mental life of adults" (Goleman, 1985, p. 118). These daily tricks which individuals engage in so frequently allow them to avoid the initial encounter with pain but eventually their use of repression and forgetting, denial and reversal, projection, isolation, rationalization, sublimation, selective inattention and automatism create an irri...