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Defenses

Isolation of Affects

Isolation of affects is knowing what happened without feeling it. You can describe a painful or important event clearly, even in careful detail, while the emotion that would normally come with it stays out of reach. The facts are kept. The feeling is set aside.

In the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, the person deals with emotional conflicts or stress “by being unable to experience simultaneously the cognitive and affective components of an experience, because the affect is kept from consciousness” (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021). Sometimes the feeling is only postponed. It turns up later, with no apparent connection to the experience that caused it.

Isolation protects against feelings, very often anxiety, shame, or guilt, that would surface if the experience were taken in directly. It lets a person handle hard facts calmly. The price, in the DMRS’s words, is that the person “misses out on experiencing the feelings in a way that adds evaluative information and which may be useful in making choices.” Feelings tell us what matters to us, and that information goes missing.

Where It Sits

Isolation of affects belongs to Level 6, the Obsessional Defense Level, within the Neurotic Defensive Category, the middle range of adaptiveness. Obsessional defenses keep an idea in awareness while keeping distance from the emotions attached to it. The DMRS describes those emotions as showing up only indirectly, through minimization, generalization, or a series of contradictory statements. The other two obsessional defenses are intellectualization and undoing.

The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale grouped isolation of affect into a single “mental inhibitions” level with repression, displacement, and the other neurotic defenses. Perry’s scales divide that level in two, separating the defenses that guard against feelings (obsessional) from those that guard against ideas (neurotic).

Compared with its neighbors:

How It Shows Up

Common signs, adapted from the items raters use to identify isolation of affects:

Examples

The plan that made no impression

Freud’s patient now known as the “Rat Man” once “mentioned quite casually” the event Freud came to see as the trigger of his illness. After his father’s death, his mother told him that a wealthy relative was ready to let him marry one of his daughters, which would open a brilliant path in his profession. He was devoted to another woman, who was poor. He had never forgotten the conversation, yet he “could not remember that he had ever attached any importance to the event.” Freud’s explanation: “The trauma, instead of being forgotten, is deprived of its affective cathexis,” that is, of its emotional charge.

Sigmund Freud, Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (1909; Collected Papers, vol. 3, 1925), pp. 333–336

The interesting operation

The psychiatrist George Vaillant summed up isolation in a single image: “a surgeon thinking the Whipple operation for pancreatic cancer is interesting.” The technical problem fills the surgeon’s attention. What stays out of view is the feeling the patient’s situation might otherwise stir. Vaillant stresses that defenses can be adaptive as well as pathological, and in an operating room this kind of distance has obvious uses.

George E. Vaillant, Involuntary Coping Mechanisms: A Psychodynamic Perspective (2011)

Talking without the feeling

Anna Freud contrasted two ways patients resist in analysis. When something threatening comes up, some simply go blank and fall silent. Patients who rely on isolation keep talking. But, she wrote, such a patient “severs the links between his associations and isolates ideas from affects when he is speaking.”

Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1937), pp. 37–38

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Repression
The two are mirror images. Repression loses the idea and keeps the feeling, which may show up without the person knowing what it is about. Isolation keeps the idea and loses the feeling. The DMRS calls isolation “the converse of repression.”
Intellectualization
Intellectualization also keeps feelings at a distance, but it does so by turning the personal into the abstract: generalities, theories, and talk of “people” instead of “me.” In isolation the person can stay with the specific facts. Only the emotion is missing.
Suppression
In suppression, the person knows what they feel and consciously puts it aside until a better time, ready to pick it up again. Isolation is automatic, and the person may not notice that anything is missing.
Dissociation
In dissociation, both the idea and the feeling stay out of awareness and come out through a temporary change in consciousness or identity. In isolation, awareness is ordinary and the memory is clear.

In Personality Styles

These personality styles count isolation of affects among their characteristic defenses:

History

The idea goes back to Freud’s earliest writing on defense. In 1894 he proposed that in obsessions, “a separation of the unbearable idea from its affect is undertaken.” The idea is weakened, and its freed feeling attaches itself to other, harmless ideas. Vaillant later pointed out that Freud had already seen emotion being “dislocated or transposed” from ideas, “by the mechanism Freud would later call isolation.”

In his 1909 case history of the Rat Man, Freud contrasted obsessional illness with hysteria. Hysteria tends to forget the event that set it off. The obsessional patient remembers it, but stripped of feeling, so that what remains “is perfectly colourless and is judged to be unimportant.”

Freud described isolation as a technique in its own right in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926), one of two, alongside undoing, that he was “setting out to describe for the first time.” In his account, after something unpleasant happens, the person inserts an interval in which nothing more may happen, and the experience is “deprived of its affect, and its associative connections are suppressed or interrupted.” He saw a normal version of it in ordinary concentration. Anna Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (German 1936; English 1937) then counted isolation among ten methods of defense.

Isolation of affect was included in the DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale (1994) and in J. Christopher Perry’s Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, which defines it and places it at the obsessional level.

Reviewing studies from social psychology, Baumeister, Dale, and Sommer (1998) concluded: “Reaction formation, isolation, and denial have been amply shown in studies, and they do seem to serve defensive functions.”

Sources