 White supremacists are supposed to be concerned with maintaining and preserving the supremacy of the white race, whatever that may be, over other variants of the human species which, according to white supremacists, are inferior. So why do we see lately white supremacists, including the proud boys, attacking LGBTQIA plus people? Why do white supremacists focus their malign attentions and negative energy on other peoples' sexual preferences and sexual orientations? The short answer is reaction formation. Thank you for listening. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Stay here. I'm going to explain everything to you. Don't run away. Reaction formation is a psychological defense mechanism. There are two psychological defense mechanisms that laymen find very difficult to comprehend and even many scholars and psychologists. It's difficult to wrap your mind around these defense mechanisms because they are counter-intuitive and exceedingly convoluted. Some of them operate in the unconscious, some of them operate in the interface between conscious and unconscious. It's a bloody mess. And today we're going to discuss reaction formation. The other defense mechanism is projective identification. And as usual, I have several videos about projective identification that I encourage you to look for. Go to the magnifying glass. If you're on a PC or a laptop, go to my channel. There's a magnifying glass symbol. Click on it and search the channel for projective identification. If you're on a smartphone, click on the downward arrow on the right hand side. It will roll down and you will see search. Click on the search, of course, and search for projective identification. Today we are not dealing with projective identification. We will be dealing with reaction formation. Freud said that if you are at heart secretly a homosexual, if you are a latent homosexual, if you did not out even to yourself, if you're still in the closet, if you're attracted to gay nudity, if you watch secretly, of course, surreptitiously, gay porn, and so on and so forth, Freud said there are two ways you can react to this. You can be honest with yourself and say, well, probably I'm homosexual or bisexual, and I'm going to try it out and I'm going to see if it fits me. And the other option is to broadcast to the entire world that you are not homosexual by becoming homophobic, by becoming an activist against homosexuals, against gay pride. So Freud said that men who have a prejudice against homosexual, but an ostentatious prejudice in your face, public, and make a big deal out of it, actually are defending against their own homosexual tendencies and feelings by adopting a harsh anti-homosexual attitude in order to convince themselves, first of all, that they are not homosexual, they're heterosexual, and then to convince everyone else. It's like, if I'm attacking homosexual, how can I be homosexual? It goes to prove to me, first of all, that I'm not homosexual. What about the dutiful daughter who loves her mother? And she loves her mother very overtly, very ostentatiously. She tells everyone how much she loves her mother. There are gestures, gifts, I mean, she's all over the place. Probably she's defending against a hatred of her mother. It is unacceptable to hate your mother. So there are two ways to go about it. You can go no contact with your mother, which I've done 26 years ago, or you can pretend and lie and deceive yourself into believing that you actually love your mother, inordinately and exceedingly. And to prove this to yourself, you engage in behaviors which affirm and confirm to you and to others around you that you actually love your mother. It's a defense and this is what reaction formation is all about, behaving in a way which denies hidden feelings and motivations which are unacceptable to you, feelings and motivations which you reject in you. Now projection is very similar to this. There are parts of you that you reject and resent and don't accept and so you attribute them to other people. You project them onto other people. But reaction formation is not only about the passive attribution of elements of your own personality to other people. You're stingy, so you say other people are stingy. You're hateful, you say they are hateful. So this is projection. But this is passive. This is merely observation. Reaction formation couples projection with action, behavior, choices, decisions, the very manifestations and protestations of innocence and of cleanliness. So where does all this come from? Reaction formation clinically is what we call a fixation. Fixation is an idea that is in your consciousness and effect and emotion, a desire that is in your consciousness and you can't get rid of it. It's a little like an intrusive thought, a little like a kind of thought that comes into your mind and you cannot erase it, you cannot delete it. So you cannot expunge these fixations. Fixations are there to stay. And so these desires, these ideas, these effects or emotions, they are overt. They are in consciousness. You're aware of them. You promulgate them. You announce them. You share them with others. You make sure everyone knows about these ideas or emotions or beliefs or desires. But they are false. It's not that you're lying to other people. You're also lying, maybe mainly lying, principally lying to yourself. There is a feared unconscious impulse, a part of you that is submerged and you're terrified of that part. For example, your latent homosexuality, your hatred of your parents, your desire to be violent, these are all things that you may reject in yourself. So you need to put on a facade, which is the exact opposite of these feared, subterranean, surreptitious, unconscious impulses. A mother, for example. Many mothers hate their children, newborns. That's why there is the phenomenon of post-natal depression. Many women regard the child as an intrusion, an annoyance. They are driven crazy by the child's insistent demand, especially in the first year, by his crying. The child becomes unwanted. But the mother is not supposed to hate her child or to be angry at her child, especially if it's an infant or a toddler. So what such a mother does, she begins to feel guilty and she becomes exactly the opposite. She becomes indulging, she indulges the child, she spoils the child, she becomes solicitous and pampering and smothering and overprotective because she's trying to convince herself that her love for the child is unbounded and that she's a good mother who does not hate her child and is not enraged. Enraged by the child's consistent demands. It's another example of reaction formation. Reaction formation was first proposed as usual by Simon Freud. It was in German Reaktions Bildung. It's clinically, technically, it's an ego defense mechanism. It's a defense mechanism affiliated with the ego. Emotions, impulses, beliefs, ideas, even images, effects which are anxiety producing because they are, for example, socially unacceptable or because they are dangerous or risky. These kind of impulses, these kind of ideas and beliefs and emotions and so on and so forth have to be controlled, have to be mastered. It's very frightening to have lurking in your unconscious a time bomb, a time bomb which is ego dystonic, ego incongruent. In other words, a time bomb which defies everything you believe yourself to be. You consider yourself to be heterosexual and then there's this time bomb that is actually your hidden latent obscure homosexuality. It's terrifying. You need to control it. You need to master it. You need to repress it. You need to suppress it. You need to convert it and reframe it and transform it or do something with it. You need to do something with it because one of the things about time bombs, ultimately they explode. And in reaction formation, we muster these forbidden hidden impulses by exaggerating in the opposite direction. If I'm a latent homosexual, I will be a macho womanizer and I will show everyone there's not a trace or a hint of homosexuality. If I hate my child, I will show the whole world and myself first of all how much I love the child. If I hate my parents, I will be all over them, care for them, give them money, I mean provide them with all the goods and services they can imagine just to show what a good son or daughter I am. Behavioral negation of these forbidden impulses. It's the same with the white supremacists. They're attacking LGBTQIA because, for example, bromance is very common in these male only or male mostly groups. There are strong sexual dynamics in these groups, denied, repressed, disavowed. These men are men's men. They are machos. They are with tattoos. They are with muscles. They're bodybuilding. They have weapons, weapons which are essentially phallic symbols, extensions of you know what. This is all about sexuality ultimately. And so no wonder they're attacking people with alternative sexualities because they're terrified of the possibility or the potential for such alternative sexualities inside themselves. Reaction formation is a very strong neurotic defense mechanism. It is on the same level, level three, with dissociation, displacement, intellectualization, repression, and so on and so forth. A text about reaction formation. The instincts and their derivatives may be arranged as pairs of opposites, life versus death, construction versus destruction, action versus passivity, dominance versus submission, and so forth. When one of the instincts produces anxiety by exerting pressure on the ego either directly or by way of the superego, the ego may try to sidetrack the offending impulse by concentrating upon its opposite. For example, if feelings of hate towards another person make the hater feel anxious, the hater's ego can facilitate the flow of love over an ostentatious love to conceal the hostility. So this is the foundational text about reaction formation. When we witness behaviors such as the ones recently with white supremacists, homophobic groups, and inside families, dynamics inside families, when we witness reaction formation, we can safely assume that the original rejected, resented fear impulse does not vanish. It persists. The reaction formation doesn't make you less homosexual, less hateful, less resentful. The reaction formation doesn't cleanse you, doesn't deactivate the time bomb inside you, what it does, it pushes these impulses, forbidden emotions, sexual tendencies, fantasies, beliefs which you disown, which you hate and reject and resent, that's not me, that's absolutely not me. Reaction formation doesn't remove these from consciousness, it just pushes these forbidden fruits into the unconscious and there they persist in the original form, which is typically infantile. So when we hate someone, when we hate our mother, when you hate your mother, you hate your father, it's socially unacceptable, you cannot sublimate it. There's no way to hate your father or hate your mother in a way that society will accept and condone, which is what sublimation is all about. Sublimation is about converting your urges and drives and impulses into socially acceptable forms and formats, but there's no way to do that and in many societies there's no way to be gay or transgender in socially acceptable, in a socially acceptable manner. Societies, they're frown upon this. So these impulses, they are suppressed and the overt behavior, the reactive formative behavior, I am not a homosexual, look, look how much of a heterosexual I am, I have another woman every week, see how much, how much I'm not a homosexual, this is the overt behavior. This reaction formation doesn't substitute for the underlying latent homosexuality. The original feelings, sexual feelings, aggression, socially unacceptable wishes, fantasies, forbidden fantasy, they exist. They exist under the surface, under the veneer, under the exterior of the observable behavior. So this is not a process of substitution, it's not even a process of displacement, it's a process of masking and masking it not only from other people, but first and foremost masking it from yourself, masking it from your own awareness, from your own consciousness. If you're a latently homosexual and you date many women, you can lie to yourself, you can say, you see, no way am I homosexual, look how many women I'm dating. This is about convincing yourself first and foremost. The existence of reaction formation is very difficult to diagnose, but one very important hallmark is it's over the top, it's exaggerated, it involves aggression and violence and compulsivity, compulsiveness and inflexibility. So we have, for example, the text that reactive love protests too much. It is overdone, extravagant, showing and affected. It is counterfeit and is usually easily detected. Another feature of a reaction formation is its compulsiveness. A person who is defending himself against anxiety cannot deviate from expressing the opposite of what he really feels. His love, for instance, is not flexible, it cannot adapt itself to changing circumstances as genuine emotions do, rather it must be constantly on display, as if any failure to exhibit it would cause the contrary feeling, the lurking feeling, to come to the surface. So it's both rigid and thespian ostentations, public for public consumption. And the number one audience is the person himself or herself. She needs to convince herself that she doesn't hate the overbearing and domineering father, he needs to convince himself that he is not attracted to men. She needs to convince herself that she doesn't hate her newborn baby because the newborn baby has taken her life away from her. So to do all this, they behave in ways which signify and denote the exact opposite. Reaction formation is counterintuitive in the sense that the behavior and the psychological reality don't match. It's a camouflage, it's a disguise, but it's not a lie in the sense that the person engaging in reaction formation is not actively gaslighting or actively lying. The person who displays reaction formation in his behaviors, choices, speech acts is not doing this because he wants to mislead other people. He's doing this because he wants to convince himself. And so solicitude may be a reaction formation against cruelty, cleanliness being obsessively, compulsively clean and neat against actually some attraction to dirt or to unclean sexual practices. Pacifism can be a reaction formation against sadism and aggression. As one of the texts says, high ideals of virtue and goodness may be reaction formations against primitive object investment, emotionally investment in primitive objects. This virtue, this goodness, these ideals are not realistic values that are capable of being lived up to. Romantic notions of chastity and purity may mask crude sexual desires. Altruism may hide selfishness, piety may conceal sinfulness. A phobia is an example of a reaction formation. The person wants that which he fears the most. He's not afraid of the object, he's afraid of the wish for the object. The reactive fear prevents the dreaded wish from being fulfilled. It's a very interesting insight about phobia. So reaction formation is used by professional psychologists and professors of psychology to explain many responses to external threats, but also to internal anxieties. And reaction formation is a breach. Very often something outside that symbolizes your inner anxiety, something outside that ratifies what you fear of most. You're afraid of something and then there's an object or a person or a place or an institution outside that ratifies, symbolizes and bodies your greatest fear about yourself. So of course this creates a lot of aggression. Stokholm syndrome, for example, that's when the hostage kidnapped, the kidnapping hostage, the victim, falls in love with the kidnapper. Obviously there's a lot of resentment and anger and rage and frustration and fury and hatred towards anyone who kidnaps you. But it's very dangerous to show this to the kidnapper because he may shoot you in the head. So this creates a reaction formation. Rather than show the kidnapper your true feelings about him, you show him that you're in love with him. The kidnapper has complete power over you. It would be extremely unwise and irrational to express your true emotions, so you repress them, you deny them, you delete them and instead you engage in behavior that signals exactly the opposite. I don't hate you Mr. Kidnapper, I love you. Powerless and vulnerable people, for example there have been studies of people inmates in Nazi concentration camps. How these people, the victims, the Holocaust victims, bonded with guards. They were even collecting objects discarded by SS officers. It's like, if I collect objects by the person who can kill me, he will not kill me. It's very primitive. It's a form of magic. Indeed reaction formation involves magical thinking. If I behave externally in a certain way it's going to affect my mind. It's going to delete what's bothering me. It's going to eliminate what I'm afraid of and it's going to obliterate any trace of that which I do not want to be. So it's a kind of reverse magical thinking. In classic magical thinking there is the mistaken belief that your mind can change the world. In reverse magical thinking there's a mistaken belief that if you act in a certain way in the world it will change your mind. And so the mechanism of reaction formation is very prevalent in obsessions. What is an obsession? Obsession is a behavior. Obsession compulsion. It's a behavior. It's a ritual. It's like if I engage in this ritual nothing bad will happen to me. If I do, if I repeat this sequence of actions, my loved ones, my nearest and dearest will not be harmed. This is the essence of obsession and this sense of obsession is another form of reaction formation. During the formation of the ego, and again, ego is a metaphor. No one captured an ego, no one spoke to an ego, and no one traveled with an ego on an airplane. Ego is a metaphor, but a useful metaphor. I find it to be a useful metaphor. So during the formation of the ego, in other words during the formation of our interface with the world, when we begin as children we begin to notice the world. We begin to venture out into the world and we do this by developing a reality testing. So when the ego is formed, there's a lot of reaction formation. Because children engage in magic. Taking on the world is a very grandiose act, saying goodbye to mommy is the most terrifying traumatic thing. And we know that religions and magic are defenses against trauma, against fear, against catastrophe. All the primitive religions are forms of reaction formation. Primitive religions and actually not so primitive religions, like monotheistic religions. What are we talking about? What is a religion? A religion is a set of behaviors and you're telling yourself, if I were behaving a certain way, nothing bad will happen to me. If I behave in a certain way, I will have reformed myself. I will have changed. Had I behaved in a certain way, I would be different. So religion and therapy for this matter, psychotherapy, these are all forms of, let's call them sublimated reaction formations, where action or a series of prescribed ritualistic actions are supposed to bring about internal transformation which would render you happier, more ego-dystonic, ego-syntonic, will remove the parts of you that you're not comfortable with. And so obsessive personality disorders very easily bleed into practices such as religion and we all know the obsessive religious person. We all met one or we all have the misfortune of having one in the family. Reaction formation may be more common among men than among women but we do have studies among women as well. Women, for example, who felt very guilty about their sexual behavior claimed to have lower sexual arousal when they were exposed to erotic stimuli. In other words, they felt bad about their sexual behavior, they felt guilty and ashamed and by the way, majority of women do. After casual sex, majority of women actually feel bad, bad in one way or another and so a possible reaction formation is to say, I actually don't like sex. I actually hate sex. I actually don't want sex. I'm in control of my sexuality. I can go abstinent or celibate for decades. I don't need sex. It's a reaction formation. It's behaving in a way which defines the truth and the truth is you're very sexual. You want to have sex, even with strangers. You're socially unrestricted. You're promiscuous, denying promiscuity by becoming frigid, by becoming not interested in sex or by extension, not interested in men. We did conduct experiment among promiscuous women who vowed to never have sex again and we discovered that their genitalia are reacting with a higher than average sexual response. Their genitalia were totally autonomous. Their genitalia, their body wanted sex. Similarly, when we tested white people, white people means Caucasians. White people who claim to be non-racist, egalitarian, pacifist, humanity-loving people, tree-huggers and I don't know what, actually these people scored higher for racist tendencies. Recent studies by Gabae, others in British Columbia and so on, show that activists in social movements are actually very high on the narcissistic and psychopathic spectrum. You heard me well. I'm going to repeat this. Activists in victimhood movements, social activists are actually high on narcissistic and psychopathic measures. So, social activism is a form of reaction formation. I'm a psychopath and maybe I don't feel good with it or maybe I hit rock bottom or maybe I don't want to be a psychopath anymore. It's not working for me. The way out is to be a social activist, to be the exact opposite of a psychopath, openly, publicly, overtly, ostentatiously become a humanity lover, become the great equalizer of the races. Black lives matter, me too. So, but actually when we test these people, they are much higher in terms of racist tendencies than the average population. But we also found out that these very people who are at heart, deep inside, seriously racist, give more money to African-American panhandlers and beggars than they do to white beggars and panhandlers. That's their way of reaction, that's their reaction formation. You see, I'm giving money to African Americans in need, giving money to African-American, homeless, so that proves that I'm not a racist. When actually, deep inside, they are. Anna Freud said that reaction formation is believing the opposite. It's a psychological defense mechanism. It goes beyond denial. It's not about denial. It's to behave in the opposite way to what you really think and what you really feel, thereby suppressing it to the point that you no longer feel it and no longer think it because you convince yourself of the big lie. These are conscious behaviors. Reaction formation is a set of conscious behaviors intended to overcompensate for an anxiety. The person feels anxiety regarding socially unacceptable, unconscious thoughts and emotions. Reaction formation is exaggerated, is showy, is compulsive, and it keeps the person satisfied because it deceives the so-called ego. It falsifies the reality testing. The person says, my true motivation is I'm not a racist. I'm not a homosexual. I'm not hateful. I'm not aggressive. But that's, of course, deceitful. If a patient comes to you and he says, I strongly believe in something and it becomes very angry when you defy him or when you disagree with him and he goes on and on and it's almost obsessive. He can't stop. That's the only thing he talks about all the time. You can rest ashore. That's exactly who he is. If he goes on and on and on about promiscuity, he's promiscuous. If he goes on and on and on about how bad it is to be a racist, he's a racist. And if he attacks LGBTQIA and all the other letters, he probably has latent homosexual tendencies. He's a latent gay, hidden, lurking, suppressed, but there. Sometimes these occult, these submerged and subsumed urges and emotions come to the surface. Sometimes even reaction formation is not enough and these people want to do something. They want to say something. This is especially common under the influence when alcohol is consumed or some other types of drugs. And then these people do or say something that is effectively the opposite of how they present themselves to the world. So you could have a social activist or a politician, a politician who is dedicated his career to fighting racism and then on camera unbeknownst to him is going to crack a racist joke. You can have a rabid humanizer who can never commit himself and he goes from one woman to another to another to another. He gets drunk and he has sex with the men. These are cracks in the reaction formation facade. Reaction formation slips a bit like a mask. The mask slips. The reality appears and this immediately provokes enormous anxiety and the anxiety is composed of two parts. Self-rejection on the one hand. Oh my god, I slept with the men. Oh my god, I'm a racist. I mean the realization of who you really are that you've been lying to yourself all your life. It's harrowing, terrifying and the second element in the anxiety is the expectation of social punishment, social sanction, excommunication, mockery, criticism being cancelled. If you fear of being criticized for something, you will visibly act in a way that shows that you are a long way from this kind of behavior or speech. If you're afraid to be honest, because being honest and politically incorrect carries a social price tag, over the years you will convince yourself otherwise. Over the years you will create a fake fake persona, fake mask, but it will adhere so closely to your face that it will become you and the reaction formation will become indistinguishable from true authentic genuine behaviors. It will become you where the person uses excessive behavior, for example exaggerated friendliness is actually feeling unfriendly, where you can judge the true core of a person by observing the exaggerated behaviors. Someone who is angry with a co-worker ends up being particularly courteous and friendly towards this co-worker. Someone who is gay has a number of conspicuous heterosexual affairs and openly criticizes gays. A mother who has a child she doesn't want, becomes very protective of that child and alcoholic extols the virtues of abstinence and is even convinced that he really believes it. It's a cover-up. It's a cover-up for something that is unacceptable in you by adopting the opposite stance, opposition, and it's distinct from projection, as I said, and so Freud called it overboarding. The person is going overboard in one direction to distract himself and us and to cover up for something unwanted in the other direction, so you're afraid of your own aggression, you become a pacifist and so these are extreme patterns. They appear in paranoia, obsessive-compulsive disorder and because they are seamlessly integrated with mental illness or some forms of mental illness, I just mentioned paranoia and so on, people who engage in reaction formation to a very large degree begin to feel that something is wrong, begin to feel ego-distony, begin to feel discomfort with themselves, they begin to actually doubt and question themselves, so people who engage in reaction formation sometimes flip, they change on a dime and overnight, they become the exact opposite when they had been preaching and hectoring over a lifetime. The zealous homophobe will suddenly out and become homosexual. The loving daughter will suddenly rebel and openly declare her hatred over her father and abandon him. These flips, these massive changes in the totality of the personality, the whole repertory of behaviors is a powerful indicator of the existence of reaction formation and so what to do with such people? How to cope for example with these white supremacists? One way is to, it's like in Judo I think or Jiu-Jitsu I have to ask Richard Granon, where he used the momentum of the opponent to win over. So one way is to agree actually with the reaction formation, to exaggerate the exaggeration, to go with and to render it a caricature so that even the person who engages in the reaction formation will recoil because he will suddenly see the comic nature of his own defensive behaviors, positions and speech acts, exaggerate, exaggerate it over the top reaction formation to render it utterly unacceptable and you know the butt of mockery. This exposes the underlying tendencies. So when you do this you should at the same time legitimize, legitimize that which the reaction formation is intended to conceal. So if there's a gay, a latent homosexual who is an overt heterosexual and an ardent homophobe, you go along with this and then you begin to broach the subject of is it really reprehensible to be gay? Is there something wrong with it? Why do you think it's wrong? I mean you deconstruct, you deconstruct the narrative legitimizing the hidden impulse, legitimizing the covert, suppressed, repressed, ignored part, denied part. The reaction formation is in many ways a cry for help actually. It's like saying I can't be myself, I have to be someone else. So you have to show that person that some of his behavior, some of the reaction formation is actually socially unacceptable and if he were to adopt his true, his authentic self, he would be much more acceptable socially than what is doing now. For example, if you are a member of militia and you kill, kill transgendered people because you're terrified of maybe you are, maybe you have transgender tendencies in yourself and you can't stand this, so you become a rabid morbid hater of transgender people and you kill a trans or two. Now that's reaction formation. It's easy to demonstrate that this is much less socially acceptable than actually admitting your transgender tendencies. So when in communication with these people you need to show them the reaction formation is non-sustainable because you know how long can you carry out this act and how long can you deceive yourself and still trust it and you have to show them that reaction formation is almost always less acceptable in society than the alternative of admitting who you truly are and how you truly feel. Then you need to legitimize it. You need to give them space. You need to listen to their ideas. You need to validate their identity. You need to embrace and accept. You need to react against the undesirable pattern of reaction formation but help them to create their own way and show them that if they were true to themselves this would actually be far less undesirable than the reaction formation. These contrarian reactions, these contrarian reactions, again they are an appeal that cry for help. You need to provide a supportive environment. You need them to feel safe to admit and to accept what is happening to them and so defense mechanisms are symptoms of a problem with reality, could be external reality, could be internal reality but there's a problem with coping with reality. You need to allow them to evolve in a safe containing environment the capacity to cope with reality. Never confront someone with reaction formation head on. It will only entrench him in his position. He will feel a lot more threatened and you will you will have lost him. That's why I never argue with a conspiracy theorist you know with reason or try to dismantle or deconstruct his nonsense. It's a wrong way to go about it. People become conspiracy theorists and they have reacted formation because they are in distress and they don't need you to add to their distress and they don't need you to put them down. That's nobody's all about. Show them that their position is socially unacceptable, more socially unacceptable than who they really are and how they truly feel and show them that their real feelings are legitimate and acceptable. I want to refer you to two articles they're pretty foundational articles published decades ago. Juni in 9th Juni J. U. N. I. in 1981 theoretical foundations of reaction formation as a defense mechanism was published in genetic psychology monographs volume 104 the abstract says among the defense mechanisms reaction formation is considered by the author to be the most stable pervading the entire personality structure. The source of the defensive energy is explored within the context of drive theory paralleling superego development and the processes of functional autonomy of other drive derivatives. The dynamics of balancing affect against behavior are analyzed with reference to the adaptive function of compulsion. Reaction formation is shown to relate closely to repression in its capacity for comprehensive impulse negation. The centrality of reaction formation within the constellation of of characterology is underlined. It's an interesting article although it's a bit too Freudian for me there are too many references to the anal phase and all kinds of psychosexual phases of development but still I think the author got many many things right or actually he got it right first and we still teach we still teach and propagate many of the insights in this article. The second article was published in Journal of Personality in January 2002. It was written by authored by Roy Baumeister who is a major figure in psychology Karen Dale and Kristen Somer. It's titled Freudian defense mechanisms and empirical findings in modern social psychology reaction formation projection displacement undoing isolation sublimation and denial and again I'll read to you the abstract recent studies in social psychology are reviewed for evidence relevant to seven Freudian defense mechanisms. This work emphasizes normal populations moderate rather than extreme forms of defense and protection of self-esteem against threat reaction formation isolation and denial have been amply shown in studies and they do seem to serve defensive functions undoing in the sense of counterfactual thinking is also well documented but does not serve to defend against the threat projection is evident but the projection itself may be a byproduct of defense rather than part of the defensive response itself displacement is not well supported in any meaningful sense although emotions and physical arousal states do carry over from one situation to the next no evidence of sublimation was found reaction formation tends to increase dramatically in polarized societies societies or conflict is the organizing principle for example american society society in the united states today is an anomic polarized society and reaction formation is bound to explode as a preferred defense mechanism we are already seeing this everything from mass shootings to white supremacy militancy is a form these are forms of reaction formation psychologists politicians decision makers or policymakers educators would do well to pay very close attention to this much neglected defense mechanism because ladies and gentlemen it is upon us