Page 24 - ISABS Here and Now
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Experts have identified four different is certainly rare to see these operating in Psychotic Denial
kinds of Psychological Defense the context of a lab.
Mechanisms: Here we can take a hypothetical example.
A couple of psychotic kind of defense A man is murdered in a far away country.
Psychotic mechanisms are as follows: When his wife is told about it, she does
Immature not believe it. This continues not just for
Neurotic Delusional Projection days or weeks, but for years. She keeps on
Mature cleaning her husband's room and dry
An example of this kind is seen in the case cleaning his clothes; she tells everyone,
In the following pages, we will take some of the main character of the movie and herself, that her husband (from
examples from each of the above four Omkara. (a film based on the whom, naturally enough, there has been
kinds of defense mechanisms. Shakespearean play: Othello). Omkara, no correspondence for all these years) will
the eponymous hero of this film, is be coming home during the next holidays.
Psychotic Defenses convinced that his wife, Dolly, is having an The woman has denied external reality as
affair with his lieutenant, Kesu. He gets so well as her emotions in order to deal with
These mechanisms are used by people convinced about this by his other the stress of losing her husband.
who are judged to be mentally ill: those lieutenant, LangdaTyagi, that he ends up
who require the use of psychiatric murdering his wife. Omkara is not willing
medicine. Use of these mechanisms to explore reality; he has converted his
results in gross distortion of reality, or its nightmares into reality. He is not only
total denial. Use of this mechanism also distorting reality, his emotional response
results in a gross exaggeration of the too is exaggerated.
emotional impact (which is why medicines
are usually required). We can consider this example as
projection, because somehow he assumes
As is evident from the name, these that his wife too would act like the typical
mechanisms are to be found very rarely: it male he considers himself to be - one who
will take pleasure in fooling one's spouse
and carrying on affairs in secret.
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