 Well, that would be Freud's term, an alter ego, but I don't like to quote him too much. He was a cokehead. But anyway, here's the definition I took, a generalized one, of what a defense mechanism is. Sometimes it's unconscious, and it's the person's soul is trying to avoid pain. So they develop defense mechanisms, no, no, and many times they don't know they're doing it. If you're married to someone who has a lot of defense mechanisms, the probability is you're probably drinking every night. It's very difficult to be married to someone who has a rack of defense mechanisms. It's hard to get through to them, it's hard to relate to them, it's hard to fix problems, it's hard to rationalize one of them, the whole thing drives you nuts, nuts. But it's the human's defense mechanism.