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Defenses

Self-Observation

Self-observation is stepping back to look at your own reactions, what you are feeling, why, and how it comes across to others, while you are still in the middle of something difficult. It isn’t simply thinking about yourself. It is noticing something true about yourself that you hadn’t quite seen, and letting it shape how you respond.

In the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, the person “deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by reflecting on his or her own thoughts, feelings, motivation, and behavior” (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021). The person can “see himself as others see him,” and so better understands how others react. The definition adds a caution: the defense “is not synonymous with simply making observations or talking about oneself.”

What self-observation gains is an accurate view of your own feelings, wishes, and behavior, so you can adapt to things as they are. It changes nothing by itself, but the DMRS calls it “a precursor for seeking better adaptations of internal states to external reality.” What it asks in return is a willingness to see what you might prefer not to.

Where It Sits

Self-observation belongs to Level 7, the High-Adaptive Defense Level, within the Mature Defensive Category. At this level, stressors are “fully perceived without distortion,” and the person takes responsibility for adapting to them. The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale places self-observation at the same high adaptive level.

Compared with its neighbors:

How It Shows Up

Common signs, adapted from the items raters use to identify self-observation:

Examples

Annie and her parents’ accomplishments

Researchers rated defenses in recorded sessions from the psychoanalysis of “Annie,” a woman in her early thirties treated for agoraphobia from 1982 to 1985. Late in treatment (session 311), she said she wanted “to allow myself to be proud for the personal achievements I’ve attained the last two years,” then worried that this was egotistical, then traced the worry back to “being taught to feel responsible for my parents’ feelings and their accomplishments and getting it mixed up with my own.” The raters coded this passage as self-observation. Early in treatment (session 5), her moments of self-observation, such as “I was wondering if maybe that’s how come I was getting so upset this morning,” were coded alongside repression, as she spoke of things she had “blocked out.”

Mariagrazia Di Giuseppe et al., Therapists’ defense use impacts their patients’ defensive functioning (2024), pp. 135, 137

Benjamin Franklin’s pride

In his autobiography, Franklin describes a plan to practice a list of virtues. A Quaker friend told him he “was generally thought proud,” that his pride showed in conversation, and that he was “overbearing, and rather insolent,” and convinced him by giving several instances. Franklin took this in and added humility to his list. Looking back in a section he wrote in 1784, he judged that he had done better with the “appearance” of humility than its “reality,” and added that “even if I could conceive that I had compleatly overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.” It is a clear example of self-observation: seeing yourself as others see you, without brushing it off or tearing yourself down.

Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (Pine ed., 1916), ch. 9

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Intellectualization
Both involve thinking about your own experience. Intellectualization does it in general or impersonal terms, and “the felt quality of emotions is lost.” In self-observation the feelings stay present while you think about them.
Devaluation of self-image
Harsh self-criticism can look like honest self-examination. But devaluation exaggerates your negative qualities, which distorts the picture. Self-observation aims at an accurate one, flaws and strengths included.
Mentalization
Mentalization, measured in research as reflective functioning, is the broader capacity to make sense of your own and others’ mental states. It is a related capacity rather than a defense, and researchers have begun to study how the two go together (Tanzilli et al., 2021).

History

Sigmund Freud used the term “self-observation” in The Interpretation of Dreams (written in 1899) for the attitude he asked of patients in free association: noticing whatever came to mind without criticizing it. He contrasted “the tense attitude and wrinkled brow of contemplation” with “the restful features of self-observation.” The meaning is narrower than the DMRS’s, but it put an observing attitude at the center of psychoanalytic technique.

In 1934 the psychoanalyst Richard Sterba described analysis as producing a “therapeutic dissociation of the ego.” Because the ego can divide itself, he argued, the analyst’s interpretations can “effect an alliance with the ego,” enlisting part of the patient in looking at the rest. Clinicians often call this capacity the observing ego.

As a named defense, self-observation comes from J. Christopher Perry’s Defense Mechanism Rating Scales. In a 1992 guide to defense research edited by George Vaillant, self-observation was one of several terms noted as “defined only by Perry.” It was included in the DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale (1994) at the high adaptive level, and the DMRS Q-sort describes it with five items (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021).

Research is still modest. Among 28 depressed patients, Tanzilli and colleagues (2021) linked better reflective functioning (a research measure of mentalization) to greater use of self-observation, self-assertion, and suppression, though in their correlation table the figure for self-observation fell short of statistical significance. In Annie’s case, Di Giuseppe and colleagues (2024) found that early on she tended to echo the defenses her analyst had just used, while near the end she used adaptive defenses more independently.

Sources