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Defenses

Displacement

Displacement is aiming a feeling at a safer target than the one that caused it. In George Vaillant’s shorthand, it is “kicking the dog instead of the boss.” The feeling is real and fully felt. Only its address has changed.

In the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, the person “deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by generalizing or redirecting a feeling about or a response to an object onto another, usually less threatening, object” (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021). Here “object” means the person or thing a feeling is about. The person “may or may not be aware” that the feeling was really meant for someone else.

Displacement protects against the risks of feeling something toward the person who actually stirred it up, often someone powerful, needed, or loved. The DMRS notes that it “allows more expression and gratification, albeit toward the wrong targets, than other neurotic level defenses.” The cost falls on the substitute target, who receives feelings they did nothing to earn, while the real problem goes unaddressed.

Where It Sits

Displacement belongs to Level 5, the Neurotic Defense Level, within the Neurotic Defensive Category, which the DMRS describes as the “middle-range of adaptiveness.” Neurotic defenses keep a wish or motive out of full awareness while letting it find some indirect expression.

The DMRS scores this level in two groups. Displacement and reaction formation form the “other neurotic” group (Level 5b); repression and dissociation form the hysterical group (Level 5a). The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale placed displacement at a broader “mental inhibitions” level that also included the obsessional defenses.

Compared with its neighbors:

How It Shows Up

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

Examples

A safer person to hate

Anna Freud described a young woman who worked in an institution for children. As a girl, she had felt intense jealousy and hostility toward her mother, but she loved her mother just as strongly and dreaded losing her love. Her solution was to keep loving her mother and redirect the hostility. From then on, there was always “a second important person of the female sex, whom she hated violently.” Anna Freud explained why this helped: “her hatred of the more remote object was not visited with the sense of guilt so mercilessly as was her hatred of her mother.” But the displaced hatred still caused her much suffering, and she went on to use other defenses as well.

Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1937), pp. 47–49

The last straw

Social psychologists have studied displacement in the laboratory under the name “displaced aggression.” In the first of three studies, participants were provoked and then either spent time dwelling on the provocation or were distracted. Later, a different person, a research confederate, made small, fumbling mistakes. Those who had ruminated for 25 minutes were more aggressive toward the fumbling confederate than those who had been distracted. The researchers didn’t call this a defense mechanism, but it is a clear example of anger finding a target other than its source.

Bushman, Bonacci, Pedersen, Vasquez & Miller, “Chewing on it can chew you up” (2005), pp. 969–983

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Projection
Displacement keeps the feeling as your own and moves it to a safer target: “I’m furious, and I’m taking it out on you.” Projection hands the feeling itself to someone else: “I’m not angry, you are.”
Sublimation
Sublimation channels a feeling into something socially valued and often creative. Displacement simply finds another outlet, often an innocent bystander. Anna Freud called sublimation “displacement of instinctual aims,” which shows how close the two ideas once were.
Transference
In therapy, feelings from important earlier relationships can get redirected onto the therapist. In 1895 Freud explained this in terms of misdirection: “The transference to the physician occurs through false connections.” What marks displacement as a defense is that the redirection spares the person a conflict with the real target.
Mood spillover
A bad mood can carry over into the next situation without any defensive purpose. Baumeister, Dale, and Sommer (1998) noted that “emotions and physical arousal states do carry over from one situation to the next,” which is not the same as redirecting a feeling to avoid a threatening target.

In Personality Styles

These personality styles count displacement among their characteristic defenses:

History

The idea goes back to Freud’s earliest work. In “The Defense Neuro-Psychoses” (1894), he argued that in obsessions an emotion may be split off from an unbearable idea and attached to a more harmless one, so that it appears to the physician “dislocated or transposed.” He imagined emotional energy as something that “can be increased, diminished, displaced, and discharged.”

In The Interpretation of Dreams, written in 1899, Freud made displacement one of the main tools of dreaming: what matters most in the dream thoughts may barely appear in the dream, while minor details take center stage. “Dream displacement and dream condensation are the two craftsmen to whom we may chiefly attribute the moulding of the dream.”

Anna Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (German 1936; English 1937) traced displacement as one stage in a person’s defensive history, as in the case of the young woman above. Displacement was included in the DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale (1994) and in J. Christopher Perry’s Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, which places it in the “other neurotic” group at Level 5.

Experimental evidence has been mixed. Baumeister, Dale, and Sommer (1998) concluded that “displacement is not well supported in any meaningful sense.” But a meta-analysis by Marcus-Newhall, Pedersen, Carlson, and Miller (2000), titled “Displaced aggression is alive and well,” found that displaced aggression is a robust effect, and that the more similar the provoking person and the later target, the more aggression is displaced.

Sources