ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a reconsideration of mental defences. Clinical studies using the communicative approach indicate that denial and repression are the basic form and foundation for all psychological defences. The chapter begins by identifying the major motives for defence formation, presents a recasting of the nature of psychological defences, catalogue currently known communicative defences, and shows the relationship of communicative defences to psychological defences on the one hand, and behavioural defences on the other. Both the general adaptive resources and the protective avoidance defences used in the emotional realm are activated by basic universal motives. The emotion-processing mind has selectively evolved to deal with environmental impingements, which, in turn, affect its architecture, motivations, and coping preferences. Emotionally charged traumatic events and messages embody and impart both conscious and unconscious meanings. Death-related traumas evoke forms of predatory or traumatic death anxiety and are most critical in selectively shaping the defensive structure of the emotion-processing mind.
