Psychological defense mechanisms, such as repression, projection, displacement, and rationalization, perform an important function in maintaining internal equilibrium, which strongly influences how a person perceives both failures and successes.

Shielding the Self: How Defense Mechanisms Shape Perception

Psychological defense mechanisms, such as repression, projection, displacement, and rationalization, perform an important function in maintaining internal equilibrium, which strongly influences how a person perceives both failures and successes. Essentially, these mechanisms “filter” information that might trigger intense tension or anxiety, allowing the individual to avoid direct confrontation with painful emotions and conflicts related to themselves and their experiences.

For example, repression helps to exclude unpleasant details or even entire actions from consciousness, which may result in failures being unnoticed or distorted – the person “honestly” forgets the uncomfortable moments that could have negatively affected their self-esteem. At the same time, projection allows one to attribute one’s own undesirable feelings or impulses to another person, thereby eliminating personal responsibility and reducing internal conflict. Displacement, as a mechanism, redirects negative emotions from an object that appears too dangerous to confront directly onto another, safer object or individual. Finally, rationalization helps to find logical, though often flawed, explanations for both successes and failures, enabling the person to maintain a positive self-image despite contradictory experiences.

Thus, these described defense mechanisms not only serve a regulatory function when confronting emotionally challenging situations but also impact the formation of attitudes toward life’s achievements and setbacks. They help protect self-esteem and maintain an illusory balance, thereby assisting in coping with emotional overload; however, at the same time, they can lead to a distorted perception of reality and hinder a meaningful self-assessment of one’s actions.

Supporting citation(s):
"Serious difficulties, regularly (and predictably) encountered on the path of our self-knowledge, are convincingly described by Z. Freud. His well-developed hypothesis about the structure and functioning of the human psyche as a homeostatic (resistant to external influences) system, whose dynamics are determined by the conflict between consciousness and unconscious urges, is impressive. Freud's undeniable contribution to modern psychology is his description and analysis of the mind’s defense mechanisms — that is, the mechanisms that maintain its equilibrium by excluding and processing information about oneself (primarily) and the world that is unacceptable to it. These mechanisms, in particular, include: repression (the primary mechanism) – suppression, the exclusion of a tension- and anxiety-arousing impulse from consciousness (for example: excluding undesirable information from consciousness – a person “honestly” forgets, say, ... their unsavory deed); projection – unconscious attribution of one’s own (to some degree repressed) feelings and impulses to another (for example: a hypocrite attributes to others desires that contradict his moral conscience); displacement – unconscious reorientation of a feeling or impulse from an inaccessible object to another, more accessible one (for example: we were offended by a boss to whom we do not dare sharply respond; once home, we “displace” our rudeness onto our loved ones); rationalization – self-deception, an attempt to rationally justify an absurd impulse or idea “in the interests” of the unconscious side of our nature (for example: we can easily find a multitude of “flaws” in a person we do not like)." (source: link txt)