Intellectualization
Defense Mechanism
Intellectualization is a defense mechanism where
reasoning is used to block confrontation with an unconscious conflict and its
associated emotional stress where thinking is used to avoid feeling. It
involves removing one's self, emotionally, from a stressful event.
Intellectualization may accompany, but is different from rationalization, the
pseudo-rational justification of irrational acts.
Intellectualization is one of Freud's original defense
mechanisms. Freud believed that memories have both conscious and unconscious
aspects, and that intellectualization allows for the conscious analysis of an
event in a way that does not provoke anxiety.
Therefore, intellectualization works to reduce anxiety by
thinking about events in a cold, clinical way. This defense mechanism allows us
to avoid thinking about the stressful, emotional aspect of the situation and
instead focus only on the intellectual component.
Jargon is often used as a device of intellectualization.
By using complex terminology, the focus becomes on the words and finer
definitions rather than the human effects.
Intellectualization
Concept Development
A common starting point when dealing with the history of
the concept of defenses is Freud’s conception of defenses in his 1926 text “Inhibitions,
Symptoms, and Anxiety”. There, Freud describes, what is often considered to be
the prototypical defensive process, which, he argues, unfolds in several
stages. First, a forbidden sexual or aggressive impulse is awakened in the id.
The ego un-consciously anticipates dangerous consequences of that impulse, such
as loss of love, abandonment, castration, or moral reproach. The anticipation
of danger produces so-called signal anxiety, a twinge of discomfort that alerts
the ego to the incipient threat. To eliminate that discomfort, the ego attempts
to jettison the dangerous impulse and its derivatives from consciousness. The
ego’s strategy in doing so is what Freud called defense.
Although Freud does not discuss intellectualization, as
such and never actually used the term, he does address the related defense of
isolation of affect during discussions of obsessional symptoms. When the
obsessional is faced with an uncomfortable experience, Freud maintains, “The
experience is not forgotten, but, instead, it is deprived of its affect, and
its associative connections are suppressed or interrupted so that it remains as
though isolated and is not reproduced in the ordinary processes of thought”.
Freud links such “isolation” with the normal phenomenon of intense concentration
of thought in which distractions are excluded from attention. Part of any
obsessional symptom, Freud is saying, is an effort to exclude unpleasant urges
from full awareness by removing their affective charge. The result is the
deadpan, emotionless presentation of the obsessional neurotic.
In J. D. Salinger’s famous book “The Catcher in the Rye”,
its adolescent protagonist, Holden Caulfield, has an idealistic vision of
children in a rye field in danger of falling off a cliff into the evils of
adulthood, and of himself as a protector who must catch them before they fall.
A common reading of Holden’s idealistic vision is that the child in danger of
falling off the cliff is in fact Holden himself, and that the fantasy
represents Holden’s unconscious conflicts about growing up. Similarly, for Anna
Freud the decisive feature of intellectualization is that it is a process in
which a patient masters unconscious conflictual material by translating it into
abstract ideas that are within the sphere of conscious control - in Holden’s
case, the idea of the catcher in the rye. Anna Freud describes intellectualization
as a process in which the ego attempts to gain control of the instinctual
drives using thought. To protect itself from overwhelming impulses, the ego
“translates” these impulses into abstract ideas. For instance, an adolescent’s
feelings about relationships may be intellectualized as philosophical ideals
about friendship and loyalty. An important feature distinguishing
intellectualization from ordinary thought is that intellectualization is not an
attempt to solve external problems but an effort to master internal drives.
Consequently, intellectualized thinking is often strikingly impractical and
unrealistic. This process of translation consists in a “connecting” of unconscious
impulses to thoughts that can be addressed in the conscious mind.
Examples
1.
A person who has just been diagnosed with a
terminal illness might focus on learning everything about the disease in order
to avoid distress and remain distant from the reality of the situation. The
doctor may eventually join in, for example, using 'carcinoma' instead of
'cancer' and 'terminal' instead of 'fatal'.
2.
A woman who has been raped seeks out information
on other cases and the psychology of rapists and victims. She takes self-defense
classes in order to feel better (rather than more directly addressing the
psychological and emotional issues).
3.
A person who is in heavily debt builds a complex
spreadsheet of how long it would take to repay using different payment options
and interest rates.
4.
Rather than confronting the intense distress and
rejection, a person feels after his/her roommate suddenly decides to move out, he
conducts a detailed financial analysis of how much he can afford to spend now
that he is on his own. Although he is not denying that the event occurred, he
is trying not to think about the emotional consequences of the lifestyle change.
5.
A man has been brought up by a strict and tyrannical
father, and he feels hurt and angry as a result. Although he may have deep
feelings of hatred towards his father, when he talks about his childhood, he
may say, "Yes, my father was a rather firm person; I suppose I do feel
some antipathy towards him even now". So, he intellectualizes; he chooses
rational and emotionally cool words to describe experiences, which are usually
emotional and very painful.
6.
A person, who is involved in sex with 13-year-old
minor girl, may even try to justify it by showing statistics that children
legally marry adult men in some cultures and even such things have happened in
history.
Defense Hierarchy
George Eman Vaillant, an American psychiatrist and
Professor at Harvard Medical School and Director of Research for the Department
of Psychiatry, has divided defense mechanisms into a hierarchy of defenses ranging
from immature through neurotic to healthy defenses, and placed
intellectualization - imagining an act of violence without feeling the
accompanying emotions, for example - in the mid-range, neurotic defenses. Like rationalization,
intellectualization can thus provide a bridge between immature and mature
mechanisms both in the process of growing up and in adult life.
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