As part of Freud’s Psychodynamic Theory, he conceptualized the idea that when a person becomes overwhelmed by anxiety, guilt, embarrassment or shame the person’s ego will employ defense mechanisms to protect itself from those feelings. Defense mechanisms are done in the subconscious and are classified in a hierarchy.
In the vignette Antonio uses several different defenses, one of them being Denial. Denial can be one of the earliest defenses to develop in a child’s subconscious and serves to protect the ego from upsetting realities of the person’s external world. Antonio exhibits Denial by running to his mother Hilda at the end of the day as if nothing had been upsetting him earlier on when she dropped him off. He also appears to be completely …show more content…
He wants to be with her all the time and does not want her to leave him so when she returns that’s all he is thinking about, that she is back. And as far as not noticing or acknowledging that his mother is pregnant could be a way of not accepting the fact that at some point he will have to share her love and protection with a new little brother or sister.
Denial can be either adaptive or maladaptive, in Antonio’s case I believe it to be adaptive, and his denial of things are not delusional or pathological. He is too young and developmentally immature to enact any kind of change to his life concerning his mother.
Another Defense mechanism that Antonio exhibits ties right in with his defense of denial and that is Acting Out, he becomes overtly reactive every time his mother drops him off at day care. He also exhibits displacement/projection when he is playing with the toys on the floor in the therapist’s room; he is playing with his dinosaur and a larger one from the toy pile. His dinosaur is in a battle with the larger dinosaur and he wins by killing the larger one. One could conclude that he had displaced/projected his frustration, anger and fear of his father onto the dinosaurs, he was obviously the smaller dinosaur since that toys means so much to him it is special and holds deep meaning to
In the vignette Antonio uses several different defenses, one of them being Denial. Denial can be one of the earliest defenses to develop in a child’s subconscious and serves to protect the ego from upsetting realities of the person’s external world. Antonio exhibits Denial by running to his mother Hilda at the end of the day as if nothing had been upsetting him earlier on when she dropped him off. He also appears to be completely …show more content…
He wants to be with her all the time and does not want her to leave him so when she returns that’s all he is thinking about, that she is back. And as far as not noticing or acknowledging that his mother is pregnant could be a way of not accepting the fact that at some point he will have to share her love and protection with a new little brother or sister.
Denial can be either adaptive or maladaptive, in Antonio’s case I believe it to be adaptive, and his denial of things are not delusional or pathological. He is too young and developmentally immature to enact any kind of change to his life concerning his mother.
Another Defense mechanism that Antonio exhibits ties right in with his defense of denial and that is Acting Out, he becomes overtly reactive every time his mother drops him off at day care. He also exhibits displacement/projection when he is playing with the toys on the floor in the therapist’s room; he is playing with his dinosaur and a larger one from the toy pile. His dinosaur is in a battle with the larger dinosaur and he wins by killing the larger one. One could conclude that he had displaced/projected his frustration, anger and fear of his father onto the dinosaurs, he was obviously the smaller dinosaur since that toys means so much to him it is special and holds deep meaning to