People can use unconscious behaviors and reactions {defense mechanism}| to relieve anxiety.
People can be unable to recall past experience {amnesia, defense mechanism}. Amnesia without physical cause typically is an attempt to escape from social stress using dissociation. Memory recovers within one or two days.
People can avoid situations or make no decisions {avoidance}.
Behavior can make up for deficiencies or inferiority {compensation defense mechanism}.
Action or thinking can express more than one drive {compromise formation}, so neither drive has results.
People can deny reality {denial defense mechanism}.
People can have thoughts of unreal situations {fantasy, anxiety}, with several themes and few but realistic characters. In fantasies, people never change into someone else.
People can attribute undesirable traits to others or assign their psychological states to other objects {projection defense mechanism}.
People can give plausible but untrue reasons for their conduct {rationalization defense mechanism} and hold two conflicting beliefs.
Behavior can be opposite to original impulse {reaction formation}.
People can escape from conditions that arouse anxiety by returning to previous or youthful mental states {regression defense mechanism}.
People can prevent unacceptable thoughts from entering conscious mind {repression, defense mechanism}.
People can repress and socialize impulses {sublimation defense mechanism} to modify anxiety. If instincts have no gratification, instinct energy displaces onto more socially acceptable interests or activities.
People can forget traumatic, dangerous, or embarrassing thoughts, memories, events, or impulses {suppression defense mechanism}, so they are unavailable in consciousness.
People can have unreasonable fear {phobia} {phobic reaction} {phobic neurosis} of objects or situations.
symptoms
Phobia involves persistent, irrational, and generalized fear or panic, provoked by specific stimuli, and autonomic-nervous-system over-activity, such as sweating, tremors, faintness, choking, breathlessness, and stomach queasiness.
age
Specific and limited phobias typically start in early childhood, and diminish during adolescence.
theories
According to learning theory, if people are intensely afraid of objects or situations that others do not fear, the objects or situations associate with childhood fears, such as loud noises or falling. According to psychoanalytic theory, feared objects or situations have become symbols of something feared unconsciously. However, facts do not support these theories.
People can fear public places {agoraphobia}|.
People can fear confining spaces {claustrophobia}|.
People can disguise anxiety sources by association between original stimulus and substitute stimulus {displacement defense mechanism}, as in dreams.
People can believe that they are another person {identification defense mechanism}, a displacement.
Imitating another person {introjection} is displacement.
Consciousness loss and long-term memory loss {dissociation defense mechanism} {dissociation state} {dissociation reaction} {dissociative reaction} are similar defense mechanisms. Repression includes dissociation. Dissociation states are conscious and aware, with experienced sense qualities but with altered perspective.
amnesia
Amnesia without physical cause typically is an attempt to escape from social stress using dissociation.
hypnosis
Dissociation, not to suggestion, cause anesthesia and analgesia under hypnosis.
hysteria
Hysteria involves dissociation.
identity
Schizophrenia, dissociative identity disorder, and other diseases show abnormal experience of identity (Ich-Störungen).
split personality
Dissociation can result in feeling that, or acting as if, one person is two different people at once {split personality}, two different people at different times {dual personality}, or more than one different people at different times {multiple personality}. People can have several personalities, typically caused by prolonged and harsh early childhood sexual abuse {multiple personality disorder} (MPD). People create second personality that does not know first personality and that feels no pain or believes pain is happening to someone else. Personalities have separate memories, and personalities have amnesia for the others. One personality can know about other one and know its memories, and that personality is present even when the other is directing body. Perhaps, people do not actually have multiple personalities but are only deceiving themselves [Hacking, 1995] [Schreiber, 1973].
People can behave as if they do not have memories {fugue, memory}, as in sleepwalking trances and post-hypnotic suggestions.
People can behave as if they do not have memories {hysterical amnesia}, as in sleepwalking trances and post-hypnotic suggestions.
People can behave as if they do not know who or where they are {hysterical dissociation}, as in sleepwalking trances and post-hypnotic suggestions.
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Date Modified: 2022.0225