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Defenses

Reaction Formation

Reaction formation is turning a feeling into its opposite. Resentment you can’t allow yourself becomes eager helpfulness. A desire you feel guilty about becomes disapproval of anything connected with it. Fear becomes cheerful bravado. Other people see only the result, often with a telltale touch of excess.

In the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, the person “deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by substituting behavior, thoughts, or feelings that are diametrically opposed to his or her unacceptable thoughts or feelings” (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021). The swap happens outside awareness: “The observer does not see the alteration, per se, but only the end product.”

Reaction formation protects against guilt. By replacing an unacceptable feeling with its opposite, the person never has to feel bad about having it, and the DMRS adds that the substitution “may gratify a wish to feel morally superior.” The cost is that the original feeling never gets a hearing. Relationships can become lopsided, with the person giving far more than they get, and keeping up the opposite stance takes constant effort.

Where It Sits

Reaction formation 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 awareness while letting it find some indirect expression.

The DMRS scores this level in two groups. Reaction formation and displacement form the “other neurotic” group (Level 5b); repression and dissociation form the hysterical group (Level 5a). The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale placed reaction formation 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 reaction formation:

Examples

Courage instead of fear

In a small pilot study, Mariagrazia Di Giuseppe and colleagues rated the defenses of nine women with breast cancer and nine patients with other cancers. The women with breast cancer scored higher on reaction formation. Their typical profile described someone who “does not show expected fear, but reacts with exaggerated enthusiasm or courage failing to acknowledge the fear,” and who gives much more than she receives without noticing the imbalance. The authors saw this cluster of defenses, which also included omnipotence and rationalization, as a way of managing feelings of powerlessness and helplessness, “replacing them with exaggerated enthusiasm and self-assurance.” It is a reminder that reaction formation can look, from the outside, like strength.

Di Giuseppe et al., “Qualitative and quantitative analysis of the defensive profile in breast cancer women” (2019)

From shoplifter to policeman

George Vaillant sketched a hypothetical life to show how defenses can mature. A teenager’s acting out, such as “temporarily comforting shoplifting,” “could evolve into reaction formation (becoming a strict policeman) and finally into the altruism of a parole officer.” The policeman stands against the very impulse he once acted on. The parole officer, a step further along, uses the same history to help others.

George E. Vaillant, “Involuntary coping mechanisms: A psychodynamic perspective” (2011), pp. 366–370

The lady protests too much

In Hamlet, a troupe of actors performs a play within the play. The Player Queen swears at length that she will never take a second husband if her first one dies. Hamlet’s mother, watching, remarks: “The lady protests too much, methinks.” The play never shows whether the Player Queen’s vows are false. But Gertrude’s line captures how reaction formation often gets noticed from outside: not by the feeling itself, but by the exaggeration.

William Shakespeare, Hamlet (first printed 1603), Act 3, Scene 2

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Undoing
Undoing expresses the unacceptable feeling and then takes it back, as in a statement immediately followed by its opposite. Reaction formation skips the first step: only the opposite feeling is ever shown.
Altruism
In altruism, people help others partly to meet their own needs and are “usually aware to some extent” that they are doing so. In reaction formation, the giving is lopsided and the person doesn’t see the imbalance.
Passive aggression
Both can look compliant. In passive aggression, there is “a facade of overt compliance masking covert resistance,” and the hostility leaks out indirectly. In reaction formation, the niceness is sincerely felt, and the negative feelings don’t show.
Deliberate politeness
Being courteous to someone you dislike, and knowing it, isn’t a defense. Reaction formation involves “an unconscious substitution”: the person truly feels the opposite of what lies underneath.

In Personality Styles

These personality styles count reaction formation among their characteristic defenses:

By contrast, the schizoid style page notes that people with that style rarely rely on it.

History

Freud described reaction formation in his Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex (1905). He proposed that childhood sexual impulses, which could only bring displeasure, “awaken contrary forces (feelings of reaction)” that build “psychic dams”: loathing, shame, and morality. In his later Introductory Lectures, he wrote that in obsessional neurosis the ego’s “counter-charges” “govern the clinical picture in the form of what we call ‘reaction-formations.’”

Anna Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (German 1936; English 1937) counted reaction formation among the ego’s ten methods of defense and called it “one of the most important measures adopted by the ego as a permanent protection.” Her examples include “sympathy instead of cruelty.” She noted that it is hard to spot as it forms, but that “definite indications of obsessional exaggeration suggest that it is of the nature of a reaction and that it conceals a long-standing conflict.”

Reaction formation 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 psychology has also found support for it. Reviewing studies in social psychology, Baumeister, Dale, and Sommer (1998) concluded that reaction formation, isolation, and denial “have been amply shown in studies, and they do seem to serve defensive functions.”

Sources