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Defenses

Affiliation

Affiliation is turning to other people when something is weighing on you: talking it over, asking for advice, letting someone help you see it more clearly. The problem stays yours. What you look for is company in facing it, and perhaps a better idea of what to do.

In the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, the person “deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by turning to others for help or support” (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021). Confiding lets the person “feel less alone or isolated,” and the other person can act as an “auxiliary ego,” lending advice, planning, or judgment. But affiliation “does not include trying to make someone else responsible for dealing with one’s own problems.”

Affiliation protects against the isolation that makes stress heavier. It meets the need for attachment and the need to cope at the same time, and sharing feelings usually eases tension. What it asks in return is a little vulnerability.

Where It Sits

Affiliation belongs to Level 7, the High-Adaptive Defense Level, within the Mature Defensive Category. At this level, stressors are “fully perceived without distortion,” and the person makes the most of their own motives while “acknowledging limitations of the self and recurring to external sources of help when available.” The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale places affiliation at the same high adaptive level.

Compared with its neighbors:

How It Shows Up

Common signs, adapted from the items raters use to identify affiliation:

Examples

Darwin writes to Lyell

In 1858 Charles Darwin received a manuscript from Alfred Russel Wallace setting out a theory very like the one Darwin had been developing privately for years. Unsure whether he could now honorably publish his own work, he wrote to his friend Charles Lyell: “I am at present quite upset.” He asked for Lyell’s “deliberate opinion,” and wanted it passed on to Joseph Hooker so that he would have the views of “my two best & kindest friends.” He laid out the case, including the arguments against himself, and asked for judgment rather than rescue. Lyell and Hooker proposed presenting both men’s work together, and on 30 June 1858 they sent the papers jointly to the Linnean Society. This is a clear example of affiliation: a painful conflict, taken to trusted friends and worked through with their help.

Charles Darwin, letter to Charles Lyell, 25 June 1858; Charles Lyell and Joseph Hooker, letter to the Linnean Society, 30 June 1858 (Darwin Correspondence Project, nos. 2294 and 2299)

The mayor and the selectman

George Vaillant described a participant in a long-term study of Harvard men whom he called Mayor Timothy Jefferson. Jefferson credited the study with teaching him to talk his problems over with other people, and described one relationship in particular: “I have developed a close relationship with one of the selectmen, and I talk things over with him.” Vaillant credited Jefferson with other mature defenses (suppression, anticipation, and altruism) and didn’t label this habit affiliation, but it fits the DMRS description closely.

George E. Vaillant, Adaptation to Life (1977; Harvard reprint 1995), p. 339

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Help-rejecting complaining
Both bring problems to other people. In help-rejecting complaining, every suggestion is turned down or met with a new problem. In affiliation, the help is taken in and used.
Making others responsible
The DMRS excludes handing a problem over for someone else to solve, pressuring someone to help, and acting helpless to draw help in.
Simply belonging
Belonging to a church, a club, or a support group, or seeing a therapist, doesn’t count by itself. Affiliation shows in the confiding and give-and-take that happen there.

In Personality Styles

The personality style pages describe affiliation as a strength or a healthier expression in the dependent style.

History

Affiliation is a newer and less settled entry than most defenses. When George Vaillant wrote in 2000 about the mature end of the DSM-IV hierarchy, the defenses he singled out were altruism, suppression, humor, anticipation, and sublimation. Affiliation wasn’t among them. In 2011 he treated “voluntarily eliciting help from appropriate others, for example, by mobilizing social supports” as a deliberate kind of coping, separate from involuntary defenses.

J. Christopher Perry’s Defense Mechanism Rating Scales took a different view and rate affiliation as a high-adaptive defense, as did the DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale (1994). Di Giuseppe and Perry (2021) note that high-adaptive defenses overlap with what other frameworks call positive coping; affiliation arguably shows that overlap most plainly.

Research on affiliation as a defense is still thin. In one study of 145 people, raters judged that patients recently diagnosed with cancer used affiliation less than comparison groups did; the study was cross-sectional, and the authors call for longitudinal research to confirm the findings (Di Giuseppe et al., 2020).

Sources