The sobering fact of family law is that to be in the business of orchestrating

98
Part II
Developmental Theory in Overview
Table 6.1
PSYCHOLOGICAL DEFENSE MECHANISMS AS THEY COMMONLY EMERGE
IN DEVELOPMENTAL SEQUENCE
DEFENSE MECHANISM
DESCRIPTION
Infantile Defenses
Conservation Withdrawal
When signaling (crying, cooing) fails to find relief,
the child shuts down in sleep
Childhood Defenses
Denial
Failure to acknowledge an anxiety-inducing
experience
Distortion
Re-forming of an anxiety-inducing experience to fit
existing beliefs
Regression
Stress-induced abandonment of most current and
sophisticated development in favor of earlier levels
of functioning
Adolescent Defenses
Fantasy
Retreat into a false world internally (as fantasy) or
externally (e.g., video games, fiction, movies)
Passive Aggression
Inaction that covertly expresses rage
Idealization
Attributing to someone unrealistically positive
qualities; failing to recognize someone’s
weaknesses or faults
Acting Out
Behavior that expresses a strong emotion without
understanding or acknowledgement that that
feeling exists
Somaticization
Expression of strong emotion indirectly through
bodily (somatic) complaints (e.g., gastric upset,
headache)
Projection
Disowning one’s own strong emotion and
attributing it instead to someone else
Adult Defenses
Displacement
Redirection of strong feelings from their actual
source to another, less threatening source
Dissociation
Separation of strong emotion from self, sometimes
expressed as a “not me” experience
Intellectualization
Acknowledgement of an anxiety-inducing event
without emotion
Reaction Formation
Distorting an unacceptable emotion into its
opposite (e.g., the thief who becomes a police
officer)
Compartmentalization
Distancing oneself from threatening emotion by
locking associated events into accessible but
separate experiences
Rationalization
Imposing reason so as to excuse or make sense out
of otherwise unacceptable and threatening emotion

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Chapter 6
The Child’s Defense Mechanisms
99
Defense mechanisms may help us to consider how children cope both
with the stresses of family conflict and those inherent in family litigation,
but they remain intangible psychoanalytic constructs that defy measure-
ment, have escaped consensual validation, and fall far short of falsifiabil-
ity. As such, recommendations delivered to the court based upon
inferences about a child’s defenses generally fail to meet
Daubert
standards.