Page 40 - Effective Communication Skills by Dalton Kehoe

Protecting the Self in Face-to-Face Talk
Lecture 10

The potential to undermine our sense of self and self-worth exists side-
by-side with others’ positive acceptance of us in every moment we
talk. In fact, people have not given each other what they want—the
understanding of each other’s thoughts and acceptance as individuals—
so many times over the millennia of human existence that as part of
the cultural learning of every child, they receive a series of conscious
defenses they can use to protect their self-esteem. This lecture reviews
the common types of defenses and how we use them to respond to a
reality that may threaten our sense of self.

et’s look at how we converse with people while avoiding situations
where we risk feeling the psychic pain of embarrassment, shame,
Lor guilt. To do that, we have to take a step back to Freud’s tripartite
model of the personality—id, ego, and superego. In this model, the self is
powered by the id’s unconscious impulses and emotions (the drive for
Lecture 10: Protecting the Self in Face-to-Face Talk
immediate satisfaction and grati¿cation). Society’s efforts to suppress these

impulses as the child is socialized are represented by the superego. This ideal
self in the superego represents the larger social order inside the child’s mind
as well as the proper behavior required by society to limit the impulses of
the id. These pressures get managed through the ego, which operates on the
reality principle. The child thinks, “I really want such-and-such, but I’ve
found in the past that when I demanded it, I got smacked, so I’m not going to
ask.” Thus the social order is reinforced.

What’s interesting is that although Freud’s version of the unconscious and
its pressures on the ego is not widely accepted today, his concept of ego
defenses and his list of defensive patterns are used by many therapists and
researchers. When we are in trouble with reality, reality always wins—so we
have to defend ourselves using one or more of these techniques:

x Denial. We simply refuse to admit that a threat is relevant to us or
assume that it can be postponed somehow.

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