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Defenses

Devaluation of Other’s Image

Devaluation of other’s image is cutting someone down to size, in your mind and often out loud, when they threaten how you feel about yourself. A rival’s success gets explained away, a helper’s advice gets mocked, a partner’s good points shrink. Making the other person smaller makes you feel less small.

In the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, devaluation means the person “deals with emotional conflicts or internal or external stressors by attributing exaggeratedly negative qualities to oneself or others” (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021). This page covers devaluation aimed at others. Its partner, devaluation of self-image, turns the same harshness inward.

The DMRS explains what the put-downs hide: “The negative comments about others usually cover up a certain sense of vulnerability, shame or worthlessness.” Devaluation can also ward off the disappointment of wanting something and not getting it. The cost falls on relationships, and on the person too, who may find it hard to learn from, or accept help from, someone they have written off.

Where It Sits

Devaluation of other’s image belongs to Level 4, the Minor Image-Distorting Defense Level, within the Immature Defensive Category. These defenses protect self-esteem from failure, criticism, or disappointment by distorting an image of self or others, but they “don’t actually improve adaptation to the stressors.” The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale also puts devaluation at a minor image-distorting level, with idealization and omnipotence, as one defense covering both self and others.

Among the immature defenses, it is grouped with the depressive defenses. The distress isn’t resolved; it is played out in relationships, as contempt, sarcasm, and fault-finding.

Compared with its neighbors:

How It Shows Up

Common signs, adapted from the items raters use to identify devaluation of other’s image:

Examples

“This god did shake”

In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Cassius tells Brutus about the day Caesar challenged him to swim the Tiber and then cried, “Help me, Cassius, or I sink!” He recalls Caesar with a fever in Spain: “’tis true, this god did shake.” Then he marvels that “A man of such a feeble temper should / So get the start of the majestic world.” Cassius says he would rather not live than be “In awe of such a thing as I myself.” Caesar reads him well: such men “be never at heart’s ease / Whiles they behold a greater than themselves.” Cassius also has a political aim, but the speech shows how a rival’s weak moments get magnified to ease one’s own sense of being outranked.

William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar (c. 1599), Act 1, Scene 2

Jane Fairfax’s faults

Jane Austen’s Emma Woodhouse dislikes the accomplished Jane Fairfax, and Mr. Knightley once told her it was “because she saw in her the really accomplished young woman, which she wanted to be thought herself.” Austen calls it a dislike “so little just—every imputed fault was so magnified by fancy.” On seeing Jane again, Emma admits her elegance. But one evening, when Emma has to play music and Jane praises her, Emma takes the praise as “an affectation of candour, an air of greatness, meaning only to shew off in higher style her own very superior performance.”

Jane Austen, Emma (1815), vol. 2, ch. 2

“Another brilliant theory”

Zalman, Aafjes-van Doorn, and Eubanks studied Alex, a patient in the TV drama In Treatment, who chose his therapist, Paul, for his reputation as “the best.” By the fifth session he was mocking him: “That’s another brilliant theory there, Doc., but how about you, Paul?” He went on to compare Paul to a celebrity sex therapist. The authors suggest this “might put the therapist in a negative light, which is likely to improve Alex’s position relative to the therapist,” and that Alex may have needed to put him down because he was struggling with a situation he did not control. They don’t use the DMRS label, but the shift from praise to put-down is a vivid case.

Hemrie Zalman, Katie Aafjes-van Doorn & Catherine F. Eubanks, Alliance Challenges in the Treatment of a Narcissistic Patient (2019)

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Honest criticism
Disagreeing with someone or naming a real fault isn’t devaluation. In self-assertion, a person “can disagree with others and express opinions without being overly hostile, devaluing, or manipulative of others.” Devaluation exaggerates, and its real job is propping up the critic.
Projection
Projection hands the other person your own unacknowledged feelings: “I’m not jealous, you are.” Devaluation doesn’t relocate a feeling; it inflates the other person’s faults.
Displacement
Displacement moves a feeling from its real target to a safer one, like snapping at a coworker after a fight at home. Devaluation usually targets the very person who stirs up the threat or shame.
Splitting of other’s image
Splitting makes a person all bad, often right after they were all good. Devaluation stays partial: the good points can still be admitted.

In Personality Styles

These personality styles count devaluation of other’s image among their characteristic defenses:

History

As Rosso and colleagues (2021) summarize Otto Kernberg’s theory (1975), primitive idealization, devaluation, and projective identification were distinctive defenses of borderline personality organization. Lerner and Lerner (1980) built a Rorschach scale on Kernberg’s ideas that rates devaluation in inkblot responses on a five-point scale; Rosso’s examples run from level 1 (“A woman in an ugly dress”) to level 5 (“A mannequin without a head”). In Rosso’s Italian study using that scale, devaluation scores separated people with borderline-level personality organization from both neurotic-level and non-clinical groups.

The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale (1994) listed devaluation as one defense at the minor image-distorting level. J. Christopher Perry’s Defense Mechanism Rating Scales (manual, 1990) separate devaluation of other’s image from devaluation of self-image, and Perry’s group counts both among the “depressive” defenses.

Research has also tied devaluation to narcissistic and antisocial patterns. In interviews with 107 people diagnosed with personality disorders, Perry, Presniak, and Olson (2013) found that narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders shared minor image-distorting defenses “such as omnipotence or devaluation.”

Sources