About rationalization and intellectualization

Abstract

Within the framework of Freud's understanding of defence, I focus on the question of whether rationalization and intellectualization should be regarded as separate mechanisms of defense. It is argued that both of these mechanisms represent a specific handling of specific substitutive formations that are produced by other mechanisms of defense. Rationalization refers to the usage of substitutive formations as a reason for action. In the guise of these ego-syntonic and socially approved substitutive motives, the original motives are hidden and appear encrypted in consciousness. Intellectualization denotes the specific handling of the outcome of a process in which instinctual wishes are isolated from their accompanying feelings, and, by virtue of further mechanisms of defense, these wishes are transferred in highly abstract substitutive formations where they also represent themselves in a mystified manner.

Keywords:

• rationalization
• intellectualization
• substitutive formation
• defense

Notes

¹Repression “denies to the rejected presentation … [the] translation into words” and a “presentation which is not put into words … remains thereafter in the Ucs., in a state of repression” (Freud, 1915c, p. 201).

²Another example is he horse phobia of Little Hans. Here the “motive force of the repression was fear of castration” and the fear of “being bitten by a horse” is a “substitute ... by distortion for the idea of being castrated by [his] father” (Freud, 1926, p. 108).

³This idea is substantiated by a comment Freud gave on June 2, 1909, in discussing Alfred Adler's lecture on “The oneness of the neuroses”: He “conceives of the neuroses as substitutive formations for the repressed libido and explains their differences in terms of the different mechanisms of the return of the repressed” (Nunberg & Federn, 1967, p. 262).

⁴In a logical relation, the necessary and sufficient condition means that statement A implies statement B, and statement B implies statement A.

⁵“It is very possible that it is precisely the cathexis which is withdrawn from the [repressed] idea that is used for anticathexis” (Freud, 1915c, p. 181).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Siegfried Zepf

Siegfried Zepf, MD, former director of the Institute of Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatic Medicine, University of Saarland (Germany). Training analyst (DPG, DGPT). Numerous publications to epistemological, psychosomatic, socio-psychological, and psychoanalytical topics. His most recent publications include: ‘Psychoanalysis and qualitative psychotherapy research - Some epistemological remarks’, Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry, 34, 645–64 (2009); ‘Consumerism and identity - Some psychoanalytical considerations’, International Forum of Psychoanalysis, 19, 144–54 (2010); ‘Psychoanalysis - On its way down a dead-end street? A concerned commentary’, Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry, 38, 459–81 (2010); ‘The psychoanalytic process and Freud's concept of transference neurosis’, Psychoanalytic Psychology, 27, 55–73 (2010); ‘Wilhelm Reich - A blind seer?’, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 15, 53–69 (2010, co-author N.J. Zepf).