The child's demystification of psychological defense mechanisms: A structural and developmental analysis.

This study sought to explore possible relationships between the cognitive developmental level of 10 preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational children and their success in interpreting each of eight commonly described mechanisms of psychological defense. Based upon a formal analysis of the logical transformations inherent in various defensive strategies, three distinct families of defense were identified, each characterized by more or less complex modes of restructuring the appearance of more candid forms of affect expression. The transformations characteristic of these alternative modes of defense were hypothesized to mirror a counterpart set of cognitive operations including the ability to take the inverse or reciprocal of various elements of thought, or to combine such first-order operations into second-order operations upon operations. The results indicated that preoperational children, lacking the requisite cognitive skills, fail to understand defensive transformations of any sort; that concrete operational subjects commonly understand defenses involving inverse and reciprocal operations; and that only formal operational subjects are able to decode defenses involving second order, transformations involving operations upon operations. The purpose of this research was to explore possible relationships between children's developing cognitive abilities and their success or failure in interpreting and explaining various mechanisms of psychological defense. Two prior assumptions underpin and prompted this search. The first of these was the almost routine assumption that cognitive development passes through a series of qualitatively different stages, each of which is in turn characterized by new competencies for dealing with progressively more difficult and logically complex transformational problems. The second and somewhat less conventional assumption