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Defenses

Idealization of Other’s Image

Idealization of other’s image is seeing someone you admire or depend on as better than they really are: wiser, stronger, more gifted, more special. Their faults aren’t invisible. They just don’t seem to count. And because you are connected to that person, some of the shine falls on you.

In the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, idealization means the person “deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by attributing exaggerated positive qualities to self or others” (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021). This page covers idealization aimed at others. Its partner, idealization of self-image, inflates the person’s own picture instead. The DMRS describes idealization as “a sort of alchemy of worthiness by association.”

It protects against feelings of powerlessness, unimportance, and worthlessness. The idealizer can admit an admired person’s faults as facts but dismisses their significance, “thereby preserving a sterling image.” The cost is that decisions and hopes rest on an image instead of a real person, and real people eventually disappoint.

Where It Sits

Idealization 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 bending the image of self or others, but they “don’t actually improve adaptation to the stressors.” The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale also places idealization at a minor image-distorting level, with devaluation and omnipotence, as one defense covering both self and others.

Among the immature defenses, it is grouped with the non-depressive defenses, which protect self-esteem by distorting reality rather than turning distress against the self.

Compared with its neighbors:

How It Shows Up

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

Examples

Mr. Collins and his patroness

In Pride and Prejudice, the clergyman Mr. Collins cannot stop praising his patroness, Lady Catherine de Bourgh. “Lady Catherine was reckoned proud by many people, he knew, but he had never seen anything but affability in her.” He knows of the fault and waves it away. Later, when she invites his visitors to dinner, Austen notes that “the power of displaying the grandeur of his patroness to his wondering visitors” was “exactly what he had wished for.” Austen plays it for comedy, but it is worthiness by association in its purest form.

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813), chs. 14 and 29

The lover’s blind spot

Freud observed that a loved person “enjoys a certain amount of freedom from criticism,” with all their qualities “valued more highly than those of people who are not loved.” He named the process: “The tendency which falsifies judgement in this respect is that of idealisation.” In many cases, he added, the loved one “serves as a substitute for some unattained ego ideal of our own.” He saw the same “absence of criticism” toward a hypnotist, and described a group with a leader as people who have each put that same figure in the place of their ego ideal.

Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (1922 English ed.), pp. 73–80

Rose-colored partners

Sandra Murray and colleagues asked married and dating couples to rate themselves and each other. On average, people saw their partners more positively than the partners saw themselves, and their impressions mirrored their own self-images and ideals more than the partner’s self-reports. Those who idealized, and were idealized, were happier in the relationship. The study measured everyday positive bias rather than the DMRS defense, and it shows the gentler end of the spectrum, where a little idealization helps.

Sandra L. Murray, John G. Holmes & Dale W. Griffin, The Benefits of Positive Illusions (1996), p. 79

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Splitting of other’s image
Splitting swings between all good and all bad, and the bad side can’t be held in mind during the good phase. In idealization, the faults are acknowledged but treated as unimportant, and the picture doesn’t flip.
Affiliation
Affiliation means turning to others for help or support, without trying to make them responsible for your problems. Idealization leans on a helper’s supposed greatness, as if their qualities alone will fix things.
Idealization of self-image
Both inflate an image. Idealizing yourself claims worth directly; idealizing someone else borrows it through the connection.
Realistic admiration
Admiring someone for things they have really done isn’t a defense. The DMRS items look for praise centered on image rather than real accomplishments, and for glowing claims without detail.

In Personality Styles

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

History

Freud gave the classic definition in his 1914 paper “On Narcissism”: “Idealization is a process that concerns the object; by it that object, without any alteration in its nature, is aggrandized and exalted in the mind.” He was careful to separate it from sublimation, which concerns what happens to an instinct, not to the image of a person. In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (German 1921; English 1922), he extended the idea to being in love, hypnosis, and loyalty to leaders.

Later psychoanalysts tied idealization to more severe difficulties. As Rosso and colleagues (2021) summarize Otto Kernberg’s account (1975), primitive idealization, devaluation, and projective identification were characteristic defenses of borderline personality organization.

The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale (1994) listed idealization as a single defense at the minor image-distorting level. J. Christopher Perry’s Defense Mechanism Rating Scales (manual, 1990) count idealization of other’s image as its own defense, separate from idealization of self-image. In a 2024 study of 655 people in Italy with symptoms of depression and anxiety, idealization (measured as one self-report defense) showed essentially no link to depressive symptoms, unlike devaluation (Di Giuseppe et al., 2024).

Sources