Undoing (Defense Mechanism) | Springer Nature Link # Undoing (Defense Mechanism) - First Online: 09 February 2017 - Living reference work entry - Cite this living reference work entry - pp 1–2 Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences ## Definition Undoing is the defense mechanism by which individuals avoid conscious awareness of disturbing impulses by thinking or acting in a way intended to revert (“make un-happen”) those impulses, even if only at a symbolic level. ## Introduction Undoing as a defense mechanism is accomplished by doing things that have the opposite meaning of the distressing impulses that the individual wants to be psychologically defended against. Examples include apologizing after being assertive or being nice to someone after having an aggressive thought against that same person. Through the use of undoing, individuals try to symbolically revert not only the consequences of an event but the event proper, as if it had never existed. In this regard, undoing has been linked to magical thinking (Baumeister et al. 1998). However, if undoing is “possible” to some degree in one’s mind, it can serve a defensive function by impeding a direct confron

Reaction formation In psychoanalytic theory, reaction formation (German: Reaktionsbildung) is a defense mechanism in which emotions, desires and impulses that are anxiety-producing or unacceptable to the ego are mastered by exaggeration of the directly opposing tendency. [1] ## Theory Reaction formation depends on the hypothesis that: > [t]he instincts and their derivatives may be arranged as pairs of opposites: life versus death, construction versus destruction, action versus passivity, dominance versus submission, and so forth. When one of the instincts produces anxiety by exerting pressure on the ego either directly or by way of the superego, the ego may try to sidetrack the offending impulse by concentrating upon its opposite. For example, if feelings of hate towards another person make one anxious, the ego can facilitate the flow of love to conceal the hostility." [2] Where reaction-formation takes place, it is usually assumed that the original, rejected impulse does not vanish, but persists, unconscious, in its original infantile form. [1] Thus, where love is experienced as a reaction formation against hate, we cannot say that love is substituted for hate, because the or