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Defenses

Anticipation

Anticipation is getting ready for something hard before it arrives. That means more than planning the practical steps. It means letting yourself feel some of what the event will be like: picturing the difficult conversation, the operation, the performance, and allowing a measured amount of worry in ahead of time, so that less of it comes as a shock on the day.

In the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, the person “mitigates emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by not only considering realistic, alternative solutions and anticipating emotional reactions to future problems, but experiencing the future distress by mentally bringing the distressing ideas and affects together” (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021). That rehearsal “allows the individual to prepare a better adaptive response.”

Anticipation softens the blow of future stress. Through what the DMRS calls affective rehearsal (“how will I feel when this occurs?”), the person takes some of the sting out of what is coming and makes good outcomes more likely. The price is paid up front: it “requires being able to tolerate the anxiety attendant to imagining how a future situation may be distressing.”

Where It Sits

Anticipation 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 deals with them while acknowledging their own limits. The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale places anticipation at the same high adaptive level.

Compared with its neighbors:

How It Shows Up

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

Examples

A little at a time

George Vaillant used two famous aviators, Charles Lindbergh and Chuck Yeager, to illustrate anticipation. Both “calmly survived flying careers that would have killed all but the most wary,” and, in Vaillant’s words, they “dealt with stress as Mithridates did with poison.” Mithridates VI, king of Pontus, was said to have swallowed small doses of poison regularly so that he would build up immunity. The image captures the heart of anticipation: a measured dose of fear, taken ahead of time, so that the full dose can’t overwhelm.

George E. Vaillant, The Wisdom of the Ego (1993)

Before surgery

In the 1950s the psychologist Irving Janis studied how people cope with surgery, interviewing 22 patients before and after their operations and surveying 149 students about operations they had had. Patients with intense fear beforehand tended to stay fearful afterward. Those who seemed untroubled, and avoided information about what lay ahead, developed a sense of “blanket immunity”; they were prone to severe disappointment and were often resistant and aggressive after surgery. Janis recommended helping patients toward a moderate level of fear and what he called the “work of worrying,” a kind of “emotional inoculation.” Patients doing that work were, in effect, using anticipation.

Irving L. Janis, Psychological Stress (1958), as summarized in Charles Gardner’s review (1958), pp. 179–180

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Worry and rumination
Anticipation has limits and a purpose: it prepares, then stops. The DMRS describes imagining how others might respond “without obsessing or over planning.” Rumination circles the same fears without leading anywhere.
Intellectualization
Planning that leaves the feelings out isn’t anticipation. The DMRS definition requires actually experiencing some of the future distress, not just thinking about solutions.
Suppression
Suppression postpones feelings about a present problem until there is time to deal with them. Anticipation does the opposite, feeling some of a future problem’s distress early.
Denial
Janis’s untroubled patients, with their “blanket immunity,” show what happens without anticipation: the threat isn’t faced in advance, so it lands all at once.

In Personality Styles

The personality style pages describe anticipation as a strength or a healthier expression in the anxious–avoidant style.

History

The idea that a little fear in advance helps people cope was given an influential research footing by Irving Janis. His 1958 book Psychological Stress described the “work of worrying” in surgical patients, and argued that moderate fear before an operation was more useful than either intense fear or untroubled calm. Later research kept testing that idea. In a study of 45 patients receiving radiation therapy for cancer, Andersen and Tewfik (1985) found patterns of anxiety they described as “consistent with the Janis model.”

George Vaillant counted anticipation among the mature defenses, and in 2000 he linked it, along with altruism, suppression, humor, and sublimation, to positive psychology. Where anticipation ends and deliberate coping begins has never been sharp. In a 2011 overview, Vaillant listed “anticipating danger, and rehearsing responses to danger” among voluntary coping strategies, separate from involuntary defenses.

Anticipation was included in the DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale (1994) and in J. Christopher Perry’s Defense Mechanism Rating Scales. The DMRS keeps it on the defense side of that line by stressing the emotional part: the person doesn’t just plan, but feels some of what is coming.

Research using the DMRS approach has looked at anticipation in people facing serious stress. In a study of 145 people, raters judged that patients recently diagnosed with cancer used anticipation less than healthy controls did (Di Giuseppe et al., 2020). The design was cross-sectional, so it can’t show whether the illness changed how people coped or the reverse.

Sources