Understanding defences and defensiveness in social work

Abstract

All human beings have defences some of which are unconscious, that is, reactions that for the most part lie beyond our immediate awareness and control. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the important role that defences play in social work and to identify the knowledge and skills that are needed when working with anxieties that lead to defensive behaviour. The paper is in two parts. The first provides a theoretical account of what is meant by the term defences, anxiety, resistance and related concepts, and then goes on to describe a number of key defences that are regularly encountered in social work, and in other related fields of practice. A second section looks at how we can work creatively with unconscious, defensive reactions and resistances, particularly the importance of containing anxiety. It describes how transference, counter-transference and projective identification can aid our understanding and help to illuminate the feelings, fears and fantasies that are evident in our work.

Keywords:

• defences
• anxiety
• resistances
• unconscious
• id
• ego
• super-ego
• psychosocial

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Sophie Ainsworth, Stephen Briggs, Nigel Elliott, Robert French, Hannah Linford, Charlotte Paterson and Tom Wengraf for their insightful comments and corrections.

Notes

¹ In much of the literature, no clear distinction is evident in relation to the terms ‘defence’, ‘defence mechanism’ and ‘mechanisms of defence’. In this paper, the term defence is used to refer to unconscious defences, where anxiety is a key feature, as opposed to conscious or aware defensive strategies.

² Instinct has been defined as ‘an innate biologically determined drive into action’ (Rycroft, 1972, p. 73). For an account of the different interpretations placed on Freud's concept of Trieb (translated variously as ‘instinct’ and ‘drive’), see Symington, 1986, pp. 114–115).

³ The term ‘neurosis’ was originally considered to be a ‘disease of the nerves’, such as hysteria. Freud's discovery that hysteria was a disorder of the personality, and not the nerves, indicated that it was a mental disturbance that had no known neurological or organic features. Hysteria derives its name from the Greek and refers to the belief that it was a dysfunction relating to women only, caused by a ‘wandering uterus’. It is still the case that women are more likely to be described as ‘neurotic’ then men.

⁴ Two important Kleinian concepts describe how splitting and projection can be used as defensive responses to anxiety. The paranoid-schizoid position is said to start occurring in the first few months of life and describes a defence that attempts to keep separate contradictory or ambivalent feelings because it feels impossible to simultaneously love and hate the same person. ‘The very young baby cannot yet understand that the mother who feeds and cares is also the one who sometimes goes away and fails to meet needs. The image of the parent is therefore divided into a good and bad figure: one idealised and one hated’ (Brearley, 2007, p. 89). The ability to cope with ambivalence, that is, the ability to allow for loving and hating the same person, is referred to as the more mature depressive position which ‘promotes concern for the other and a wish to make amends and repair any damage the child imagines it has caused. Inadequately worked through, the depressive position can lead to unreasonable fears in later life that any hatred will damage or destroy a loved person’ (Bateman et al., 2010, p. 113). The depressive position is similar to Winnicott's notion of the capacity for concern which describes a child's concern about the consequences of his or her ruthlessness.