ABSTRACT
Psychological defenses are processes by which our mindbrains change reality, suppress or transform drives and emotions, misattribute personality characteristics from ourselves to others or from others to ourselves, or leave out aspects of reality to lessen anxiety. This chapter traces the history of psychological defenses in psychoanalysis and their interaction with the theory of dreams. It moves to an examination of three ways that we can see evidence of psychological defenses in dreams and explores several psychological defenses. These three ways are: the dream image may represent the defense itself; the dream's story line, rather than the imagery itself, shows the operation of the defense; and the dreamer may also show the operation of a defense in the way the dream is told and experienced, including glosses. Repression is the defense in which an unpleasant thought, memory, or feeling is actively kept from awareness, by forgetting.
