ABSTRACT
The communicative approach, with its adaptive orientation and use of trigger-decoding, calls for revisions and extensions of current understanding and formulation of mental and behavioural defences. In addition to the many psychological defences identified by various psychoanalysts, there is a vast array of communicative mental avoidance defences as well. Mental defences have both phylogenetic and ontogenetic sources. Nevertheless, nature's rule of conserving patterns of resource suggested the search for a more complete armamentarium of defences against environmental traumas than currently known. The thesis that the emotion-processing mind must operate according to selectionistic principles is grounded on the repeated observation that nature and natural selection conserve their designs and resources. Instructionism can have some power to change conscious-system selections, as witnessed by conditioning and deconditioning and similar forms of therapy. Clinical work—especially within empowered psychotherapy, where communicative defences are most readily identified—has revealed a large and varied repertoire of these defences.
