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Displacement (Defense Mechanism)

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Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences

Definition

Displacement is the defense mechanism by which individuals cope with acute anxiety by transferring emotions about a stressor onto other objects or activities that are less psychologically threatening, for example, eating to avoid the awareness of difficult personal relations or aggressiveness toward one person replacing original aggressiveness toward the other. As with other maladaptive defenses, the original stressor is put out of conscious awareness with the consequence that constructive coping is not possible, making displacement a vulnerability factor for psychopathology.

Introduction

The original concept of displacement as a defense mechanism had its origin in Freud’s theory of dream formation, where displacement is one of the mechanisms of dream distortion, that is, the processes by which the latent (unconscious) content is transformed into the manifest content of which the dreamer is aware (Freud 1900/1953). With displacement the dreamer would only be aware of an...

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References

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. WJCR – William James Center for Research, ISPA – Instituto Universitário, Lisbon, Portugal

    Rui Miguel Costa

Authors
  1. Rui Miguel Costa
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Correspondence to Rui Miguel Costa .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Oakland University, Rochester, USA

    Virgil Zeigler-Hill

  2. Oakland University, Rochester, USA

    Todd K. Shackelford

Section Editor information

  1. Macquarie University, North Ryde, NSW, Australia

    Simon Boag

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Costa, R.M. (2017). Displacement (Defense Mechanism). In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1374-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-28099-8_1374-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-28099-8

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