Psychological Adaptive Mechanisms

Book excerpt: This book provides a clinical tool for recognizing, and understanding, human adaptive responses to stress and the anxiety it causes. For use in the here-and-now, the recognition algorithm systematically delineates the observable hierarchy of psychological adaptive mechanisms, known in psychoanalytic theory as ego defenses, established in previous longitudinal research. Based in a theoretical model, it teaches practical, systematic recognition of these mechanisms which are not only helpful to know when seeing a patient but also when observing human behavior in everyday life.