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Defenses

Passive Aggression

Passive aggression is expressing anger or resentment sideways instead of saying it. On the surface, the person goes along: agrees, says yes, seems cooperative. The resistance comes out somewhere else, in forgetting, delay, silence, half-hearted effort, or quietly letting things go wrong. The anger is real. It just never shows its face.

In the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, the person “deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by indirectly and unassertively expressing aggression toward others. There is a facade of overt compliance masking covert resistance toward others” (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021). It often appears when the person is asked to perform independently, or when someone has let down a wish to be taken care of, even an unspoken one. The DMRS also counts “turning against the self” as part of this defense: in its extreme form, the resentment is turned back on oneself “to get at the other.”

According to the DMRS, people who rely on this defense have learned to expect punishment, frustration, or dismissal if they state their needs directly to someone with power over them. Looking cooperative avoids retaliation while still registering a protest, with some satisfaction in the annoyance it causes. The price is that the need never gets voiced, so it rarely gets met. Others grow frustrated, resentment builds, and the person often ends up hurting their own interests.

Where It Sits

Passive aggression belongs to Level 1, the Action Defense Level, within the Immature Defensive Category. This is the lowest level of the DMRS hierarchy. Action defenses reflect a sense that the source of stress is outside oneself and that the experience is intolerable. Instead of being held and thought about, the distress is acted on, and “this is done without anticipating negative consequences.” The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale also places passive aggression at its action level, alongside acting out, apathetic withdrawal, and help-rejecting complaining.

Among the immature defenses, passive aggression is grouped with the depressive defenses, a set that research has repeatedly linked with depression. The DMRS describes the person as feeling powerless and resentful.

Compared with its neighbors:

How It Shows Up

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

Examples

The unreturned calls

In a clinical vignette used to illustrate the DMRS Q-sort, a psychotherapy patient reported “a series of passive aggressive behaviors toward a number of people,” such as being slow to return phone calls and calling up his ex-girlfriend. In the session he was sarcastic toward the therapist and complained about the therapy. When the therapist suggested that his opposition, silence, and distance were reactions to not getting what he wanted when he wanted it, he rejected the idea and became more oppositional still. The raters counted passive aggression among his main defenses, alongside help-rejecting complaining. Near the end of the session he was finally able to reflect on the pattern and work more collaboratively.

Mariagrazia Di Giuseppe and J. Christopher Perry, The Hierarchy of Defense Mechanisms (2021)

“I would prefer not to”

In Herman Melville’s story, a Wall Street lawyer hires a quiet copyist named Bartleby. When asked to help check a document, Bartleby answers “in a singularly mild, firm voice”: “I would prefer not to.” Asked again, he gives the same reply, and he goes on giving it. He is never rude and never raises his voice, which only makes it harder to respond. The lawyer reflects, “Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance.” Melville never explains what drives Bartleby, so this is a fictional picture of the outward shape of the pattern, and of the frustration it stirs in others, rather than a diagnosis.

Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener (1853)

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Help-rejecting complaining
Both carry hidden hostility. In help-rejecting complaining, it rides on repeated requests for help that are then turned down. In passive aggression, it rides on apparent agreement followed by quiet non-performance.
Acting out
Acting out turns feelings directly into uncontrolled action, without reflection. Passive aggression is controlled and covert: the person stays outwardly cooperative, and the resistance shows only in what doesn’t get done.
Self-assertion
The mature alternative. Self-assertion means expressing feelings and thoughts directly, and the DMRS specifies that it “is not coercive or indirect and manipulative.” In a 2024 study of defenses as a network, self-assertion and passive aggression were negatively connected.
The everyday label
In popular speech, “passive-aggressive” has become shorthand for almost any sulky or snide behavior, and for decades psychiatry treated it as a personality disorder. The defense is narrower: a particular way of handling a particular conflict, usually resentment toward someone with power over you, that anyone may fall into at times.

In Personality Styles

These personality styles count passive aggression among their characteristic defenses:

History

The diagnosis came out of military psychiatry. In Christopher Lane’s history of the disorder, its first official document is a 1945 U.S. War Department technical bulletin, in which Colonel William Menninger described soldiers who were not openly defiant but expressed their aggressiveness “by passive measures, such as pouting, stubbornness, procrastination, inefficiency, and passive obstructionism.” Menninger saw this as an “immaturity” and a reaction to “routine military stress.”

As Lane has documented, the American Psychiatric Association carried the military language almost word for word into its first diagnostic manual in 1952, and passive-aggressive personality disorder became a common diagnosis. Doubts grew, and in the DSM-IV (1994) it was moved to the manual’s appendix as “Passive-Aggressive Personality Disorder (Negativistic Personality Disorder),” without an official diagnostic code.

Passive aggression was also studied as a defense. George Vaillant placed it among the immature defenses. The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale (1994) put it at the action level, and J. Christopher Perry’s Defense Mechanism Rating Scales defined it, folded in “turning against the self,” and placed it at Level 1.

Research has tied the defense to depression and personality problems. Kramer and colleagues (2013) found that patients with borderline personality disorder used more action-level defenses, the level that includes passive aggression, than matched healthy controls. In a 2024 network study of 655 adults with depressive and anxiety symptoms, using a self-report version of the DMRS, passive aggression was the most interconnected of the immature defenses and was associated with depressive symptoms. Perry and colleagues (2025) list passive aggression among the immature defenses that studies have strongly associated with depression.

Sources