Saint Mary’s University

SCHOOL OF HEALTH and NATURAL SCIENCES

Nursing Department
Bayombong, Nueva Vizcaya
Course No. NCM117 Lecture
Subject: Care of Client with Maladaptive Patterns of Behavior, Acute and Chronic
Year Level: BSN 3
Contact Hours/Credit Units: 4 hours/week (4units)

CHAPTER 5

ADJUSTIVE MECHANISM

I. Introduction:

All human beings use mental mechanisms to alleviate anxiety perceived during times of stress. When it fails
to resolve emotional conflict, a person’s defenses may become pathological to the extent of attracting
attention and requiring treatment and sometimes hospitalization. These mechanisms are characteristic
ways of behaving in response to situation which threaten the security of the self-system. Mental
mechanisms may be use consciously or unconsciously.

II. Learning Objectives:

1. Enumerate the different defense mechanisms.

2. Discuss the uses of defense mechanism.
3. Discuss how ego defense mechanism and coping mechanism serve as adaptation to anxiety.

III. Core Content of the Chapter:

USES OF DEFENSE MECHANISM:

1. To resolve mental conflict.
2. To resolve anxiety and fear.
3. To protect self-esteem.
4. To protect one’s sense of security.

THE DIFFERENT DEFENSE MECHANISMS:

1. Compensation: Covering up for a weakness by over emphasizing a desirable trait.

2. Conversion: Converting an emotional conflict through physical symptoms which have no organic basis.

3. Denial: Evades the unpleasant realities in life or refusing to acknowledge their existence.

4. Displacement: Transfer of emotions felt in a previous situation where its expression would not have
been socially acceptable.

5. Dissociation: Separation of painful feelings and emotions from one’s consciousness.

6. Fixation: Immobilization of a part in the personality development resulting from unsuccessful completion
of the next task.

7. Identification: An attempt to model oneself from another person.

8. Introjection: Introject is to ingest or take into. Incorporating wishes, values and attitudes of other person
as if it were your own.

9. Projection: To throw off or referred to as blaming someone else for their failures.

10. Rationalization: To excuse ones idea, action and feeling so as to avoid guilt.

11. Reaction formation: A conscious behavior that is substituting directly opposite wishes from ones true
wishes.

12. Regression: A process where in the person escapes the frustration and anxiety of conflict. He now
returns to the early and more comfortable developmental level.

13. Phantasy: Daydreaming to satisfy innate longings.

14. Undoing: Doing something to counteract or make up for wrongdoings.

15. Symbolism: It is when a person attaches significances to object, material or words.

16. Isolation: Protecting oneself to avoid painful situation.

17. Repression: The unpleasant memories and desires are stored in the unconscious mind. This is called
selective forgetting and selective remembering.

18. Resistance: It is an overt and covert hostility towards anxiety producing information.

19. Sublimation: Redirecting unacceptable drives into socially acceptable one.

20. Substitution: It is the acceptance of something else in place of a desired object or need.

IV. Activity:
Long Quiz

V. Bibliography:
Videbeck, S. (2020). Psychiatric-Mental Health Nursing. Wolters
Keltner, N., Bostrom C., & McGuiness T. (2012). Psychiatric Nursing. Elsevier Inc.

Prepared by:
Mrs. Rosalie C. Carreon, RN, MSN
Nursing Department