Defense Mechanisms Essay

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Defense Mechanisms Team C: Kelley Deemer, Lorna Vixie, Laurie Brandy, and Robert Rall Everyone in today’s society deals with anxiety in one form or another. Psychoanalytic theory believes that our ego develops and uses defense mechanisms to deal with and protect us from our everyday anxiety. Sigmund Freud believed that defense mechanisms helped shield the ego from the conflicts created by the id, superego and reality (McLeod, 2008). Defense mechanisms are thought to be our unconscious mind working to protect us against feelings and thoughts that our conscious mind find too difficult to deal with. Defense mechanisms can be thought of as unhealthy, but they can help us adapt and allow us to function normally. There are many mechanisms that one can go through, but four we will cover are demonstrated denial, projection, rationalization, and reaction formation. Lindsay Lohan is a good example of how people in society use defense mechanisms, because of her many outrageous acts in the public eye. Lohan has showed so many signs of a troubling personality of someone who has problems and issues, in the way of her life. Lindsey Lohan’s actions have come from somewhere within her and she acts out as a result of personality traits and past life experiences. All too much we have seen in the media her outburst and serious, issues. Lindsay Lohan has been arrested for DUI several times. At one point, she went into rehab. On November 29, 2013, she was arrested for assaulting a woman in a club in New York. Later that day, she was charged with various things, including reckless driving, due to a car crash she was in earlier that year. She was charged for an earlier crime because it was determined that she lied to police when she said that her assistant was driving at the time. Due to these new charges, her probation was dropped and she was sentenced to 90 days in a

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