ABSTRACT
This chapter examines therapists’ narratives in terms of their use of adaptive defenses and associated resilience correlates, giving access to both conscious and unconscious self-descriptors. Defenses employed repeatedly can help create a portrait of the individual’s sense of, and wishes for, their place in the world. Higher Adaptive Defenses are most closely aligned with resilience traits. Repeated reviews of the interview transcripts revealed that responses to questions or stories told could represent multiple defenses, as well as references to wishes and beliefs about self and identity. Wishes became an important sub-category of inferences from therapists’ reports in building a profile of the needs, assets, and values of clinicians. A person’s conscious and unconscious statements about the experience of their place in the world and sense of self, offer a window to understanding their emotional resilience. The chapter addresses the clinicians’ cumulative use in the interviews of Mature Adaptive Defenses as related to emotional resilience.
