(2005). Medical News Today.

Retrieved October 28, 2010 at http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/35545.php

Defense mechanisms, or repression, according to Sigmund Freud, were at the root of human anxiety. To deal with cognitive dissonance, or challenges to one's ego, contradictory information was repressed and anxiety was temporarily reduced. Although during the 1960s many laboratory studies on learning and memory and studies of perceptual defense treated the existence of defense mechanisms as empirical fact, in more recent times the concept has begun to fall out of fashion. "Repression was explained by attentional processes and response suppression, while projection was explained by attribution. At least as studied in the laboratory, these processes were not seen to involve unconscious functioning and thus, by definition, did not involve defense mechanisms" (Cramer & Coll 2000).

However, defense mechanisms have now been renamed and reformulated under what is currently understood of human psychology. For example, a primitive defense mechanism such...
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