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Defense mechanism

Psychology
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Unconscious strategies to protect the ego from anxiety or distress.

Detailed Definition
Defense mechanisms like denial or projection shield the psyche from painful truths. Poetry often reveals these indirectly—through irony, unreliable narration, or symbolic displacement—exposing the gap between surface expression and hidden emotional reality.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” projection (a defense mechanism) transforms the father into a Nazi and the speaker into a Jew; In Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” the Duke uses rationalization to justify murder; In T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” intellectualization masks social anxiety; In Emily Dickinson’s “After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” emotional numbing serves as a defense; In W.H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” hyperbole (“Stop all the clocks”) defends against overwhelming grief; In Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck,” the poet dons a mask to confront trauma indirectly.
Additional Notes
Defense mechanisms—unconscious strategies to reduce anxiety (Freud)—include repression, projection, denial, and displacement; in poetry, they manifest as metaphor, irony, or narrative distortion; e.g., Plath’s “Daddy” uses projection to externalize inner conflict; useful for students to identify which mechanism operates and how it shapes poetic voice; remember: defenses aren’t “bad”—they’re adaptive, though poetry often reveals their limits.
Also Known As
Psychological defense Defense Coping mechanism
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