| Defense Mechanism | Unconscious Process Employed to Avoid Anxiety-Arousing Thoughts or Feelings | Example |
| Regression | Retreating to a more infantile psychosexual stage, where some psychic energy remains fixated. | A little boy reverts to the oral comfort of thumb sucking in the car on the way to his first day of school. |
| Reaction formation | Switching unacceptable impulses into their opposites. | Repressing angry feelings, a person displays exaggerated friendliness. |
| Projection | Disguising one’s own threatening impulses by attributing them to others. | “The thief thinks everyone else is a thief” (an El Salvadoran saying). |
| Rationalization | Offering self-justifying explanations in place of the real, more threatening unconscious reasons for one’s actions. | A habitual drinker says she drinks with her friends “just to be sociable.” |
| Displacement | Shifting sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person. | A little girl kicks the family dog after her mother sends her to her room. |
| Denial | Refusing to believe or even perceive painful realities. | A partner denies evidence of his loved one’s affair. |