GeistHaus

Defenses

Altruism

Altruism, as a defense, is dealing with your own distress by helping other people with theirs. It isn’t the same as ordinary kindness or as self-sacrifice. What makes it a defense is a link between the helping and something the helper has lived through or is struggling with, often a time when they needed help and didn’t get enough of it.

In the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, the person “deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by dedication to fulfilling the needs of others, in part as a way of fulfilling his or her own needs” (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021). The helper receives “some partial gratification either vicariously or as a response from others,” and is usually aware, at least to some extent, that their own needs are involved. Raters score altruism only when there is “a clear, demonstrable, functional relationship” between the person’s feelings and the helping.

Altruism protects against old feelings of helplessness. It “channels affects, such as anger, and experiences, such as powerlessness, into socially helpful responses that also enhance the individual’s sense of mastery over the past.” What it gains is considerable: a real need in someone else gets met, the helper’s own needs for connection are met along the way, and an old wound becomes a source of competence.

Where It Sits

Altruism 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 tries to make the most of their own motives. The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale places altruism at the same high adaptive level.

Compared with its neighbors:

How It Shows Up

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

Examples

Hull-House

Jane Addams opened Hull-House, a settlement house in Chicago, in 1889. In her memoir she described the years before it, marked by “nervous depression and sense of maladjustment” and “a sense of futility, of misdirected energy.” She came to believe that many educated young people like herself had no outlet for their energies: “their uselessness hangs about them heavily.” She titled her explanation of the settlement movement “The Subjective Necessity for Social Settlements,” openly naming the helpers’ own needs, and wrote that Hull-House was opened “on the theory that the dependence of classes on each other is reciprocal.” Addams was aware that helping her neighbors also answered a need of her own, which is close to how the DMRS describes altruism.

Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), pp. 65–127

From shoplifter to parole officer

George Vaillant sketched, as a teaching illustration, how one person’s defenses might mature over decades. An adolescent’s acting out (“temporarily comforting shoplifting”) “could evolve into reaction formation (becoming a strict policeman) and finally into the altruism of a parole officer.” The same unruly impulse is first acted on, then reversed, and finally put to work helping other people who are where the helper once was.

George E. Vaillant, “Involuntary Coping Mechanisms” (2011)

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Altruistic surrender
Anna Freud used this term for a pattern in which a person gives up their own wishes and enjoys them only through other people, in a chapter she titled “A Form of Altruism.” She treated it as a form of projection. DMRS altruism differs: the helper’s own needs are partly and knowingly met, not renounced.
Reaction formation
Excessive helpfulness or sweetness can be a cover for hostility the person can’t accept. In altruism, the feelings behind the helping are allowed, not reversed.
Martyrdom
The DMRS describes failing to stand up for one’s own interests, “maybe even assuming a ‘martyr’ role,” as a sign of passive aggression. Self-sacrifice that leaves the helper resentful or depleted isn’t altruism in the DMRS sense, which includes some gratification for the helper.
Everyday kindness
Not every generous act is a defense. Altruism is rated only when the helping is clearly tied to the helper’s own emotional conflict or stress.

In Personality Styles

The personality style pages describe altruism as a strength or a healthier expression in the depressive and masochistic styles.

History

An early psychoanalytic account of altruism as a defense appears in Anna Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (German 1936; English 1937). Her “altruistic surrender” described helping as a kind of giving up: the person lives out wishes through others that they no longer allow themselves.

George Vaillant’s long-term studies of adult development reframed it. He counted altruism among the mature defenses, and in 2000 he linked altruism, suppression, humor, anticipation, and sublimation to positive psychology, reporting that the maturity of a person’s defenses was largely independent of social class, education, and IQ. In 2011 he described defenses as lying “along a continuum of personality maturation,” with altruism near the far end.

Altruism was included in the DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale (1994) and in J. Christopher Perry’s Defense Mechanism Rating Scales. The DMRS sharpened the definition in two ways: it requires a demonstrable link between the person’s feelings and the helping, and it accepts that the helper may also have a direct reward or an openly self-interested reason.

Research usually studies altruism together with the other mature defenses. In a sample of 90 Harvard men followed for more than seven decades, raters coded mature defenses (including altruism) from life narratives. More adaptive defenses in midlife predicted better physical health at ages 70, 75, and 80, partly because those men had more social support (Malone et al., 2013).

Sources