Intellectualization - psychological defense, examples

Mechanisms of psychological defense of the individual

In 1894, this term was introduced by Sigmund Freud. The first mention of psychological defense is found in his work “Defensive Neuropsychoses.” The concept was then used by Freud in a number of other studies aimed at describing the struggle of the “I” and painful thoughts and affects.

Psychological protection is associated with the transformation of the individual’s system of internal values, which helps eliminate traumatic moments. On our website you can also read about the functions, benefits and disadvantages of psychological defenses. The most common ones are briefly described below.

Types of psychological protection

denial is a distortion of worldview. A person does not accept information that worries him. This method is formed in childhood and often does not allow people to adequately perceive what is happening;
repression is considered a universal way of liberation from internal conflict. Occurs due to exclusion from consciousness of an inadmissible motive or unpleasant information;
projection - consists of the unconscious transfer of personal feelings, desires and inclinations to another person. As a rule, a person does not want to admit them to himself because of their inherent social unacceptability;
identification is the transference to oneself of desired but inaccessible feelings and qualities that are inherent in another person. In childhood, identification is a simple way of mastering ethical norms and rules of social behavior;
rationalization is a person’s fraudulent interpretation of his desires and actions. In fact, they may be caused by reasons, the recognition of which would mean a loss of self-respect;
substitution - represents a change in the direction of action from an inaccessible object to an accessible one. This technique does not lead to the desired goal, although it allows you to relieve tension by transferring activity to a different direction;
alienation is a kind of isolation of consciousness from negative factors. Unpleasant emotions are blocked, the connection between the emotional coloring and the event is erased;
suppression - implies exclusion from consciousness of the essence of the traumatic event and emotions. This mechanism is used to restrain feelings of fear, the manifestation of which is unacceptable for positive self-perception;
regression is a kind of return in the event of a problematic situation to earlier or more immature forms of behavior (“I am a child, and you should help me”);
introjection - implies the symbolic inclusion of another person or object in one’s own image. Reception is exactly the opposite of projection. Plays a significant role at the stage of early personality development and is the basis for the assimilation of parental values and ideals;
compensation - is an unconscious attempt to overcome real or imaginary shortcomings. It is carried out through persistent self-improvement, the desire to achieve results;
reactive formation - is a process of replacing impulses, desires and feelings that are unacceptable to consciousness. This occurs by developing and emphasizing the opposite attitude towards a situation or behavior.

Rationalization and intellectualization

Since rationalization is closely related to the so-called. intellectualization, then in order to keep these connections in mind when discussing various aspects of the work of rationalization, it is better to imagine the mechanism of intellectualization now.

Intellectualization is understood as a set of mental processes of awareness, understanding and verbalization (verbal expression) by a person of his own experiences, thoughts, conflicts and dissonances, relationships with other people, etc., in general - the contents of his mental activity. The leading goal of this complex process is to master internal and external reality and establish control over them. The goal of intellectualization is to transform one's own conflicts and other emotionally charged problems into a neutral, purely mental task. In the process of intellectualization, the cognitive content of a conflict or other experience is isolated from its emotional aspect. A person begins to talk about his personally significant problem as if it were someone else’s concern and essentially has little concern for him.

Unlike rationalization, in the process of intellectualization the development of arguments has a comparatively more logical, “smart” character. When rationalizing, we mainly deal with visible, false logic - with psychology.

Anna Freud also studied in detail those intellectualizations that are used by adolescents and young men in the puberty period of their development. IN her opinion, teenagers and young men use such mental work to cope with their conflicts. When conflicts of drives are described with the help of ideas and judgments, the individual gains the opportunity to become aware of them and establish control over them.

To successfully implement the intellectualization process, you must already have a sufficiently high level of intellectual development. In turn, systematic intellectualization contributes to the further mental development of the individual.

However, a question arises that we could ask when considering each of the defense mechanisms, namely: why does a person choose this particular mechanism and therefore use it to such an extent? This problem has not yet been completely resolved. Trying to answer this question, as Heinz Hartmann rightly noted, it should be taken into account that the ability to learn and think are functions independent of instincts and defensive processes. (True, we can only talk about the relative independence of intellectual functions from instincts and protective processes).

According to Anna Freud, the intellectualization of instinctive life is one of the earliest achievements of the human ego. This researcher considered intellectualization not just an activity of the ego, but also an integral part of it.

Intellectualization is a defense mechanism with which one strives to get rid of severe emotional states and anxiety caused by stress and frustration by discussing the situation as an abstract problem. The cognitive aspects of frustration are emphasized, and explanations are proposed that, by weakening the individual’s emotions, allow him to act more consciously and clearly.

Intellectualization and empathy

We can consider that these two phenomena - empathy and intellectualization - are in inverse proportion to each other. This means that in interpersonal relationships, the more individual A uses the adaptive mechanism of intellectualization, the weaker his empathy with those whom this intellectualization concerns. So, proposing the rule of the inverse relationship between intellectualization and empathy, we will try to illustrate it with the help of an example often cited in the literature. For example, stress specialist T. Cox writes: “... a doctor may treat his patient without emotion, as a faceless case number so-and-so, as a typical case of angina or something else. The doctor can control his own feelings by avoiding too close contact with the patient or not taking his suffering to heart. For this reason, a professional - a doctor, psychologist or nurse - does not like to treat those who are emotionally close to them. It is difficult to remain dispassionate in such a situation.” Interesting data of this kind are provided by T. Shibutani, I. Hardy and other authors. A member of the medical staff must maintain a psychological distance between himself and the patient and not attach too much importance to the patient’s experiences, since only under this condition will he be able to provide the patient with effective professional care.

Suppressing empathy through intellectualization is a way of psychological self-defense.

Another very common case of intellectualization is the following: a person who has lost a close relative, spontaneously, but clearly in order to alleviate his mental pain, begins to reason that the deceased could have lived a long time because he was a happy person, or, conversely, that death saved him from suffering and other troubles of this life.

One of the ways of intellectualization in cases where a person manages to get out of a dangerous situation harmlessly is the following verbal formula: “I got out of the situation successfully, it could have been worse.”

The main thing in intellectualization is the process of concept formation and their verbalization, that is, the verbal expression of those concepts that are generated in the human psyche on the basis of his perceptions.

Verbalization can take place at different levels depending on how fully we know the subject, why and for whom we express its image of perception in words. Each object has several names (for example, a table is not only a table, but also furniture (a piece of furniture), an artifact, an object (in general). Depending on the situation in which verbalization occurs, we choose one name or another.

However, for each object one of its names is the main one, has, as it were, a “highest status”. In the above example, we feel. that the main name of an object is the word “table”, since it most fully expresses its essence (or rather, the most familiar and clear, stable meaning of this object in people’s lives). When verbalizing, the problem arises of choosing those names of intellectualized objects that best suit the current situation and the goals pursued by a person. It should also be noted that the use of linguistic categories not only completes the process of concept formation, but also continues it, contributes to the formation of concepts that began at the non-linguistic level.

Types of intellectualization

Intellectualization is a universal and diverse mechanism of psychological self-defense of individuals and groups. It can appear both in a “pure” form, that is, as intellectualization itself, and in the form of rationalization, isolation, denial of action, and, possibly, in other variants. Since this book examines rationalization in many ways and in detail, we will get acquainted with the other types of intellectualization.

A. Isolation. — Isolation. — During isolation, a person perceives or remembers certain events, but at the same time his emotional components are separated, isolated from cognitive ones, and suppressed. As a result of this, the emotional components of mental content are barely conscious and poorly experienced. An idea (thought, impression, event) is perceived as if it were relatively neutral and did not pose a threat to the individual. For example, a woman tells the doctor that she was seduced by an adult man when she was still a girl, but she does not experience any emotions while talking about this. She remembers some moments associated with the seduction, but does not remember what happened before and after that.

Examples like these show that the isolation mechanism operates in different ways. Not only are the emotional and cognitive components of the impression isolated from each other; This form of mental self-defense is combined with the isolation of memories from the chain of other events, i.e., a disintegration of associative connections takes place in the human psyche. Essentially, isolation also leads to retrograde and progradient amnesia, causing the memories of traumatic feelings to be maximally impaired. The reproduced content appears “colorless” and does not cause concern or concern to the individual. Extreme forms of such isolation are found in neurotics (for example, in obsessional neurosis).

It also happens that only an emotional experience is reproduced, while the content associated with it either penetrates consciousness with a delay, or is not realized at all. An example of such isolation is the following phenomenon, which occurs in all people: after waking up from sleep with dreams, a person has a specific experience (for example, that he came into contact with something mysterious), but cannot say what the content of the dream was.

Psychoanalyst Norman Cameron noticed a very interesting subtype of the isolation mechanism: a person has a realistic knowledge about something (for example, about sex life), which in his psyche lives side by side with a regressive, often even infantile interpretation. For certain reasons, this false interpretation is not repressed; it appears both in consciousness and in the subconscious sphere, although it often causes anxiety. The patient acts as if the infantile false interpretation is true, although at the level of consciousness he still knows that it is not so. Cameron gives an interesting example: a young woman thought that after giving birth to a woman, all her insides might fall out to the ground. She expressed this opinion without even fearing that she would become the subject of ridicule. She accepted the simple explanation that this was impossible with amazing naivety. Her anxiety and other symptoms disappeared and her isolation was overcome.

The consequences of the isolation mechanism are also observed in the behavior of people who are sentenced to death. Some of them may seem outwardly indifferent to talk about their upcoming execution. In fact, their experiences, we believe, are complex and painful. But in such situations, some of them have a peculiar experience, as if everything is happening. happens not to them, but to another person, and they themselves are indifferent external observers. This is another pathological mechanism known as depersonalization. We can assume that this complex mechanism also includes insulation.

The presence of such “islands” of thought in the human psyche also affects behavior: it becomes inconsistent. For example, when many times a person is disappointed because of his kindness, he tends to repress this quality of his and tends to act like a strict and unkind person. But when his self-control weakens, he spontaneously performs good deeds. Behavior becomes inconsistent.

B. Denial of action. — Denial of a perfect action (undoing) is another type of intellectualization mechanism. This category also includes the so-called. cleansing rituals, cleansing behavior. Such rituals allow a person to free himself from painful feelings.

This mechanism can be illustrated by the following example, which we borrow from Otto Fenichel. A seventeen-year-old boy experiences severe conflict over his practice of masturbation. In a conversation with him, his pastor condemns this habit and advises him never to associate with another boy who masturbates. The patient knew another boy who did this and found it very difficult to give up the habit. When meeting him, he felt awkward. Soon he began to avoid meeting him, and when he met him on the road, he turned to the side.

This little ritual is an example of undoing. In this way the patient rejects masturbation and cleanses himself immediately after illicit contact with another boy.

B. Attribution of meaning to absurdity. — The following aphoristic thought is attributed to a well-known Russian specialist in the field of psychology of language and speech: “Speech is nothing more than the comprehension of the meaningless.” In other words, people often rationalize absurdity, absurdity, and nonsense. This is a fairly common form of intellectualization.

Intellectualization: how this psychological defense mechanism works

Intellectualization in psychology is an attempt to unconsciously escape from feelings, abstracting from frustrating factors. This psychological defense mechanism is considered a more complex form of isolation. The difference is that a person acknowledges the presence of certain feelings, but discounts their strength or influence.

Intellectualization is very useful in the case of excessive emotional potential. It allows you to maintain the logic of your thoughts and not get lost (for example, under the influence of panic).

To eliminate emotional experiences, a person resorts to the help of intellectual resources. Thus, he replaces the experience of emotion with thinking about it and analysis (for example, instead of real love, talking about love).

In other words, feelings are neutralized. Often, with the help of such a technique, a person seeks to justify his “escape” from reality.

Intellectualization in psychology: examples of defense

Examples of the implementation of this mechanism are observed very often in our lives:

in reasoning about the merits and demerits of the object of love at the moment of need to choose;
excessive explanation of the reasons for fear. In this case, the feeling itself is analyzed as if separately from the person. He can tell you about his emotions without any intonation or behavioral confirmation;
Having heard from your interlocutor “I’m angry”, spoken in a completely calm tone, or “I’m scared” from a person who continues to drink tea, you know that the psychological defense of intellectualization has worked.

In fact, at this moment you and I are using intellectualization - we are trying to convey important information in the restrained language of psychological terms

What is intellectualization?

Intellectualization is a psychological defense when a person tries to isolate himself from experiences by abstracting from them. With isolation, a person simply tries not to feel the emotions that arise in him, and with intellectualization, a person experiences emotions, simply trying to devalue them, make them less significant, and reduce their strength. He does this by beginning to talk about his feelings, the reasons for their occurrence, and how they proceed.

A clear example is that people often talk and discuss love, but never experience it that way. A person can avoid love by analyzing it, looking for a clearly defined feeling for this feeling, and not just experiencing it.

On the one hand, intellectualization is useful because it allows a person to reduce internal tension and allow a more calm assessment of the situation. On the other hand, when there is a clear bias towards intellectualization, then the real vision of the situation is distorted. In principle, all types of psychological defenses are aimed at distorting reality, which will allow a person to react to it more calmly.

Why are problems often not solved, but drag on for months and even years? People increasingly do not solve their problems, but try to run away from them, hand them over to other people, or pretend that nothing is happening. But as life shows, even such tricks do not work, and people have faced problems and continue to face them.

To solve a problem, you need to stop thinking about it as a problem, you need to turn it into a task. In other words, you stop complaining and discussing what happened and ask yourself, “What should I do next about this?” What do you want to get out of the situation? How should you proceed to solve the problem? These are the questions we need to think about. But many people do not solve problems, but discuss problems without wanting to solve them.

To transform a problem into a task, you need to devalue it. Remember how irritated and consumed by emotions and feelings you behave when you are in some kind of problem. Everything annoys you, you are angry, offended, etc. At this moment you are completely immersed in an unpleasant situation. But it is impossible to look for a way out of a situation while you are in it. While you are immersed in a problem with feelings and emotions, you cannot solve it. But as soon as you devalue the situation, that is, stop thinking about it as a situation that somehow touches you, annoys you, offends you, you immediately calm down, get out of it and can find a solution to the problem.

Devalue an unpleasant situation, that is, make it a fact, an event that does not disturb you, does not bother you, does not hurt your feelings. Yes it was. Yes, it happened. Well, now we need to think about what to do next and what result to get out of this situation.

People cannot solve their problems because they are caught up in their feelings and emotions. They remember over and over again what unpleasant things happened to them, how they felt, what they were worried about. But as soon as you turn this event into a fact that happened to you, but there is nothing special about it for you, you immediately calm down and even find ways out of the problem. People get stuck in their problems because they remember over and over again their feelings and experiences that they experienced at the same time. But as soon as a person stops remembering his emotions, and simply looks at what happened as a fact, an event that needs to be solved somehow, the problem immediately turns into a task. Devalue an unpleasant situation or problem, and then you will find a way out of it.

Examples of intellectualization:

A person evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of a partner while in a state of choice.
A person talks about the fear he allegedly experiences.

Intellectualization manifests itself in a person’s calm and intonation-free reasoning about his feelings. If you see a person talking about his love while calmly sipping coffee, or talking about his fear while calmly clicking on his phone, then we can talk about intellectualization.

Intellectualization is comparable to rationalization (when a person tries to logically explain a phenomenon) and is the opposite of affectation (the uncontrolled experience of emotions and their vivid manifestation).

Intellectualization is a psychological type of defense when a person actually acknowledges his feelings, but does not experience them, but seems to move away, looking at them from the outside. In this case, a distortion of reality occurs when a person sometimes does not show his feelings to the full extent, which distorts his reaction to what is happening and leads to inappropriate behavior.

What is intellectualization in psychology: let’s summarize

In the article, we examined in detail what intellectualization is in psychology: examples of its work, how it manifests itself and what it can lead to. Knowledge of the essence and mechanisms of operation of this and other defenses can help maintain a person’s peace of mind in various uncomfortable situations. If he admits the thought of his imperfection and shortcomings, then he takes the path of overcoming the contradictions that arise.

Each person uses various psychological defense mechanisms in his life. Some of them are more “adult”, mature and acceptable, some less so. If you feel like you can’t figure it out on your own and would like to get professional help, on our website you can sign up for a consultation with a psychologist. Our specialists will definitely help you!

Description

Intellectualization is considered a more complex form of such a protective mechanism as isolation, however, if during isolation a person usually believes that he does not experience feelings isolated by him, then with intellectualization he recognizes some emotions (although he often underestimates their strength and significance). Using this defense, a person, as it were, transfers his emotions to an abstract, intellectual level, talking about them as certain theoretical concepts that have some relation to him. There is no full-fledged experience.

This defense is extremely effective, as it allows you to reduce the dependence of your own behavior on emotions without completely losing information about these emotions. The behavior of an intellectualizing person in an emotionally charged situation is often perceived as adult, mature, predictable, and approved by society. This makes this protection quite attractive to many people.

However, intellectualization also has its disadvantages. Like any defense, intellectualization still distorts the perception of reality. As already mentioned, an intellectualizing person tends to underestimate the strength and significance of his emotions. In addition, by using this defense, a person loses the opportunity to fully experience and, as a result, give an adequate emotional response in situations of social interaction. If a person tends to use this defense everywhere, in all or almost all emotionally charged situations, he undoubtedly has problems in close interpersonal interactions, when he thus blocks manifestations of love, tenderness, sympathy, and cannot fully discuss his grievances and fears. and disappointment[1].