The mind’s defenses—like the body’s immune mechanisms—protect us by providing a variety of illusions to filter pain and to allow self-soothing

 Introduction

The mind is its own place, and in itself

 Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.

John Milton, Paradise Lost

Our lives are at times intolerable. At times we cannot bear reality. At such times our minds play tricks on us. Our minds distort inner and outer reality so that an observer might accuse us of denial, self-deception, even dishonesty. But such mental defenses creatively rearrange the sources of our conflict so that they become manageable and we may survive. The mind’s defenses—like the body’s immune mechanisms—protect us by providing a variety of illusions to filter pain and to allow self-soothing.

Often such emotional and intellectual dishonesty is not only healthy but also mature and creative. Such defensive self-deception reflects the ego’s—the integrated brain’s—best synthetic effort at coping with life events that otherwise would be overwhelming. Equally important, such self-deception evolves throughout our lives. Our development does not end with childhood but continues through adulthood. The maladaptive defenses of adolescence can evolve into the virtues of maturity. This psychic alchemy helps to explain the resilience of individuals who are abused and disadvantaged during the first decades of life and yet become valued and useful adults. In short, our ego’s defenses can be creative, healthy, comforting, and coping. Yet when we are observers—rather than users—of defenses, they often strike us as downright peculiar.

Sixty years ago the physiologist Walter B. Cannon wrote a landmark book, The Wisdom of the Body, in which he described the invisible response of the human digestive tract to distress.1 He clearly identified the checks and balances employed by our bodies’ parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems to maintain homeostasis—the term he used to describe a body at peace with itself. In his research Cannon capitalized on what was then a recent invention, X-ray photography, to monitor hitherto invisible physiological processes. Echoing Cannon, I have called this book The Wisdom of the Ego, because I believe the invisible responses of the human mind to distress—the defenses deployed by the ego—are as healing, and as necessary to health, as the autonomic nervous system that he did so much to elucidate.

Like Cannon, I capitalize on a recent scientific advance—in my case the availability of records of prospectively gathered human lives. I draw my evidence from the Study of Adult Development, in which large numbers of people have been followed from adolescence through their adult fives. Such prolonged study helps to render visible the healing power of the ego’s defenses. In addition, the rich database of hundreds of lives provides statistical support for generalizations made from individual fives. Because one question of interest is the relationship of the ego’s adaptive self-deceptions to human creativity, I also examine the life histories of several creative artists.

In this book, then, I weave together three threads. One thread is the mind’s—the ego’s—modes of self-deception and denial, sometimes referred to as mechanisms of defense. To use a Piagetian term, the deployment of such defenses reflects our adult efforts to accommodate to life. The use of ego mechanisms of defense alters the perception of both internal and external reality; and often, like hypnosis, use of defenses compromises other facets of cognition. Awareness of instinctual wishes may be greatly diminished; antithetical wishes may be passionately adhered to; our consciences or our awareness of other people may be obliterated. I shall offer evidence that a person’s choice of defenses is critical to mental health.

The second thread is an examination of creativity—the peculiarly human capacity for putting in the world what was not there before. Such a capacity for creativity seems closely interwoven with the alchemy of the ego to bring order and meaning out of chaos and distress. Such creative capacity can allow grief to be mitigated by an esoteric hobby, and it can allow self-deception to be viewed as a virtue rather than a sin. In Piagetian terminology, creativity reflects how we assimilate life, take life in, make it our own, and share it with others. Creativity is how we experience life and pour it forth.

The book’s third thread is the unfolding of adult development. The study of lifetimes allows reexamination of cross-sectional views of adult development. Such study permits us to see how people bud and flower, and how human caterpillars evolve into butterflies. It allows us to trace how the capacity for intimacy makes possible the commitment essential for a gratifying career identity, and how such fulfillment from a career makes possible a capacity for generative care. It also allows us to see that this developmental sequence of love-to-work-to-care appears to hold for both men and women.

More important, prospective study of lifetimes demonstrates the resilience and the continuing maturation of adults. Freud diminished human hope by suggesting that the first five years of life were destiny. The evidence I adduce in this book restores hope. The data from the Study of Adult Development demonstrate that mental health and choice of defense are not static. Rather, choice of defense may evolve throughout adult life and may transmute irritating grains of sand into pearls. Nor is choice of defense determined by social class, education, or gender.

The modem psychoanalytic use of the term ego encompasses the adaptive and executive aspects of the human brain: the ability of the mind to integrate, master, and make sense of inner and outer reality. Or, in Freud’s words, “We have formed the idea that in each individual there is a coherent organization of mental processes; and we call this his ego.”2 The term ego addresses the capacity of the integrated mind to accommodate and assimilate the world.

On the one hand, personality development and maturity occur through the interaction between the person and his or her social environment. On the other hand, as John Milton reminds us, experience is not what happens to the mind (and heart) but what the mind (and heart) does with experience. How the mind manipulates experience is at the core of ego development.

We are accustomed to thinking of ego development as something that occurs in childhood. The developmental psychologist Robert Kegan has described watching the ego development of a young child as follows: “Being in another’s presence while she so honestly labors at an astonishingly intimate activity—the activity of making sense—is somehow very touching.” Such development, as Kegan notes, is social: “Our survival and development depend on our capacity to recruit the invested attention of others to us.”3 To develop, a child needs a loving caretaker, one who creates for the child what D. W. Winnicott has called a “holding environment”—that is, an environment that provides the child with the secure foundation it needs to mature and to develop a sense of self. Eventually, the caretaker’s love comes to dwell inside the child, where it supports the capacity of the ego’s self-deceptions to turn life’s leaden moments into gold, as it were, instead of into self-detrimental distortions and illusions.

But this book is not about children. Although Kegan expresses a fear that adolescents and adults less frequently “display themselves in these touching and elemental ways,” he realizes it may only be that in adults “we are less able to see these ways for what they are.”4 This book is about adults who have exposed their entire lives to scrutiny and have been seen in similarly vulnerable and intimate activities. This book is about middle-aged men and women wrestling with learning how to love, with making meaning, with reordering chaos, and with discovering, often inadvertently, how to put in the world what was not there before. Their life stories offer example after example in which maturation and the internalization of a holding environment occur in adulthood, not in childhood.

Finally, quite unashamedly, I wish to argue for preserving the baby of psychoanalysis even as we discard its bath water. I wish to remind the reader that we have limbic systems as well as cerebral cortices, and that the brain cannot be separated from the heart. This book is an effort to undo some of the excesses of the so-called cognitive revolution, of the medicalization of psychiatry, and of what has been called the “decade of the brain.” Howard Gardner, in his lucid history of the cognitive revolution, notes the deliberate decision of cognitive scientists to exclude certain factors that “would unnecessarily complicate the cognitive-scientific enterprise. These factors include the influence of affective factors or emotions, the contribution of historical and cultural factors, and the role of the background context in which particular actions or thoughts occur.”5The Wisdom of the Ego reflects my studied effort to recomplicate such an enterprise.

The prospective study of human lives makes it possible to look closely at psychological experiences and to trace their similarities and differences in large groups of men and women. In the words of the psychiatrist John Nemiah, “The difficulty many people have in accepting the validity of psychodynamic concepts lies not in their lack of a cognitive ability to understand the theory, but in their incapacity or unwillingness to observe the clinical facts on which the theory is based.

Those who reject psychodynamic theory refuse to take subjective human psychological experiences as phenomena worthy of serious attention and study, and consequently they cannot or will not allow themselves to observe them.”6 This book, using data from the prospective, long-term study of many lives, renders those subjective, human psychological experiences visible to even the most intransigent empiricist.

Throughout the book, I will point out the distortions that occur between the actual and the remembered past, between the artist’s life and her creative product, and between current reality and our perceptions of it. My intent will be to make the hidden visible, and to retrieve the dynamic “unconscious” first popularized by Freud and Janet from the parochial grip of the “Freudian” humanists so that it can be reinserted into the grasp of natural scientists. It is time for the ego and its defenses to be seen as facets of psychobiological reality, not as articles of psychoanalytic faith.

Notes

1  W. B. Cannon, The Wisdom of the Body (New York: Norton, 1932).

2  S. Freud, The Ego and the Id (1923), in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (hereinafter abbreviated SE), ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953-1964), 24 vols., 19:17.

3  R. Kegan, The Evolving Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 16, 17.

4 Ibid., p. 17. 

5 H. Gardner, The Mind’s New Science (New York: Basic Books, 1985), p. 6. 

6 J. Nemiah, “Reflections of an Aging Educator: A Tale of Two Residents” (Teacher of the Year Award Address presented to the Association of Academic Psychiatry, Seattle, 1990).

**

Academic psychology, however, retains a mistrust of the unconscious in general and of defense mechanisms in particular. The “cognitive revolution” has ignored defenses, and only recently has modern experimental psychology been groping to reinvent a language for regulatory self-deceptions. The reasons for such mistrust stem both from the rigorous, if sometimes limiting, empiricism of academic psychology and from the often self-serving excuses given by psychoanalysis for ignoring empiricism.

In many respects the mistrust of defense mechanisms is unwarranted. Modern experimental psychologists often forget that Freud, too, began life as a scientific empiricist. Many modern psychologists try to study personality as if trying to understand operas by just reading the libretto. Freud insisted that we attend to the music as well. The metaphors of John Keats, Guiseppe Verdi, or William Shakespeare are simply better equipped than the literal-minded prose of Immanuel Kant or B. F. Skinner to describe the scientific realities of a colorful sunset or the pain of a broken heart. Freud reaffirmed that humans are the guardians of forces they cannot see or perfectly control. Modern investigation of the hypothalamus and the limbic system has left the central importance of these forces unquestioned. The good news is that psychologists have recently begun to rediscover defense mechanisms. But their terminology differs from mine: they try to operationalize defenses as “self-deceptions,” “comforting denial,” and “cognitive regulatory mechanisms.”

At the same time, in many respects the mistrust of defense mechanisms is entirely warranted. In conceptualizing defenses, Freud made many errors. At first he saw defenses as only pathological. To be fully analyzed supposedly meant to give up defenses. Thus, Freud did not always appreciate that defenses were homeostatic and could help even the most psychologically healthy adult keep from being immobilized by anxiety and depression. Second, he erroneously believed that all pathogenic defenses had their roots in childhood. In addition, because of events in his own life and historical epoch, Freud saw defenses as too exclusively related to sexual conflict; he ignored their equally important role in regulating aggression, grief, dependency, tenderness, and joy. Finally, having studied people in the solitude of the consulting room, Freud ignored the role of ego defenses in modulating relationships. He placed too much emphasis on a psychology of drives and too little on a psychology of relationships.

The Wisdom of the Ego

George E. Vaillant