The term ‘defence’ traverses the depth-psychology corpus along two broad axes that rarely converge without tension. The first is the metapsychological axis inaugurated by Freud and elaborated most systematically by Klein, Winnicott, Bowlby, and Kalsched: defence designates the psyche’s characteristic strategies for managing overwhelming affect, unbearable loss, or traumatic annihilation anxiety. Klein maps devaluation, dispersal of emotion, and flight to internal objects as defences against envy and loneliness; Winnicott identifies the ‘false self’ as a massive defensive organisation capable of social success while concealing psychic futility; Bowlby reconceives defence through cognitive-psychological language as the exclusion of information from further processing, and frames anxious attachment itself as a defensive compromise. Kalsched extends the concept furthest, proposing with Leopold Stein that the Self deploys archetypal defences that, when misfiring under trauma, produce auto-immune-like self-destruction. The second axis is ethical and literary: Adkins traces the role of legal defence in archaic Greek homicide proceedings; Snell contrasts Homeric ‘defence’ of the fatherland with the more aggressive martial glorification of Callinus and Tyrtaeus. These two axes illuminate a shared underlying problematic — the organism, whether psyche or polis, erecting barriers against an intruding other — and invite comparison across clinical and cultural registers that the corpus only partially undertakes.
the extreme negativity and self-destructiveness present in people who are primitively defended, might be understood as an attack by the primal Self on parts of the ego that it mistook for foreign invaders
Kalsched, following Stein, argues that the Self’s archetypal defence system can misfire under trauma, turning against the ego in a psychic analogue of auto-immune disease.
, The Inner World of Trauma: Archetypal Defences of the Personal Spirit, 1996thesis
devaluation and ingratitude are resorted to at every level of development as defences against envy, and in some people remain characteristic of their object relations
Klein identifies devaluation of the object as a pervasive defensive manoeuvre against envy that, when dominant, permanently colours object relations.
, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957thesis
the false-self defence, and when this is detected the clinician must then decide whether this is likely to be a positive help in the analysis, or whether in a particular case it is pathologically powerful
Winnicott argues that the false self constitutes a massive defensive organisation whose clinical management determines whether psychoanalysis is viable or dangerous.
, The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment, 1965thesis
When these defences are very powerful and dovetail successfully, loneliness may often not be consciously experienced. Some infants use extreme dependence on the mother as a defence against loneliness
Klein shows that developmental achievements — dependence, internal objects — can be co-opted as defences against the irreducible loneliness at the core of the self.
, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, 1957thesis
these tools enable us to examine defensive phenomena from a new point of view, to collect data more systematically and to formulate hypotheses in a language shared by other behavioural scientists
Bowlby proposes that information-processing models offer a more rigorous framework for studying defensive phenomena than classical metapsychology, while acknowledging that such a framework remains incomplete.
, Loss: Sadness and Depression (Attachment and Loss, Volume III), 1980thesis
Anxious attachment is a defence, a compromise between the need for security in a dangerous world and the inability of the parent to provide a secure base
Within Attachment Theory, anxious attachment itself is reframed as a defence — a regulatory compromise rather than a primary drive state.
, John Bowlby and Attachment Theory (Makers of Modern, 2014thesis
defence mechanisms 5; addiction as a defence against mental pain 19, 26, 45
Addenbrooke’s index entry frames addiction explicitly as a defensive operation against mental pain, situating it within the classical psychoanalytic theory of defence mechanisms.
, Survivors of Addiction: Narratives of Recovery, 2011supporting
the man who struck first was the phoneus; for he compelled the man who was defending himself to strike a blow in reply
Adkins reconstructs the logic of archaic Greek legal defence, showing how causal responsibility for homicide was contested through an argument about who initiated the sequence of compulsion.
, Merit and Responsibility: A Study in Greek Values, 1960supporting
Where Homer speaks of defence, Callinus talks war and loudly proclaims the glory of the battle
Snell traces a historical shift in Greek martial ethics from Homer’s sober notion of defence to the active glorification of battle in the archaic lyric poets.
, The discovery of the mind; the Greek origins of European, 1953supporting
the divine sign refused to allow him to prepare a defence, and also that Socrates himself declared this to be unnecessary, on the ground that all his life long he had been preparing against that hour
Plato’s introduction to the Apology presents Socrates’ deliberate refusal to construct a legal defence as itself a philosophical and ethical stance.
, Apology, -399aside