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Defenses

Undoing

Undoing is taking something back, in words or actions, as if that could cancel it. A person says something strong, then qualifies it until it means almost the opposite. Or they do something they feel guilty about, then make a gesture that symbolically erases it. Both halves really happened, but the person is left feeling as if neither quite did.

In the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, the person deals with emotional conflicts or stress “by behavior designed to symbolically make amends for [or] negate previous thoughts, feelings, or actions” (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021). In conversation, a statement is “immediately followed by qualifications bearing the opposite meaning from the original statement,” which can make it hard for a listener to tell what the person really feels or intends.

Undoing protects against the guilt or anxiety stirred up by a feeling, impulse, or action. Expressing the opposite relieves the distress, and the act of reparation “removes the individual from experiencing the conflict.” The cost is that the conflict is never really felt or settled, and the person’s position stays blurry, even to themselves.

Where It Sits

Undoing 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, which show up only indirectly, through minimization, generalization, or a series of contradictory statements. The other two obsessional defenses are isolation of affects and intellectualization.

The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale grouped undoing into a single “mental inhibitions” level with repression, reaction formation, 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 undoing:

Examples

The stone in the road

Freud’s patient now known as the “Rat Man” was staying at the same summer resort as the woman he loved. On the day she left, he knocked his foot against a stone in the road and felt obliged to move it aside, because her carriage would pass that way in a few hours and might come to grief against it. A few minutes later this struck him as absurd, and he felt obliged to go back and put the stone in the middle of the road again. Freud saw a battle between love and hate toward the same person: first the protective act, then “undoing this deed of love by replacing the stone where it had lain, so that her carriage might come to grief against it.”

Sigmund Freud, Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (1909; Collected Papers, vol. 3, 1925), pp. 327–330

Talking about the fee

A 2024 study rated the defenses of both people in a psychoanalysis from the 1980s. The patient, called Annie, was a woman in her early thirties seeking help for agoraphobia. In an early session, after her husband’s income changed, the analyst raised the question of the fee. Annie went back and forth: “in a way, I wish it would have covered it and in a way, I’m glad it didn’t because; I don’t know”. Raters scored her lines as undoing. They scored the analyst’s lines the same way: the fee would stay as it was “for now,” but it “would be reasonable to reconsider.”

Mariagrazia Di Giuseppe et al., Therapists’ Defense Use Impacts Their Patients’ Defensive Functioning (2024), pp. 131, 135

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Reaction formation
In reaction formation, the unacceptable feeling is replaced by its opposite, and only the opposite shows: resentment becomes conspicuous kindness. In undoing, the original feeling or act comes first and is then cancelled, so both are visible in sequence.
A genuine apology
Making amends is healthy when it includes facing what you did and how you feel about it. In undoing, the act of repair stands in for that feeling. The DMRS describes the person focusing on the act while avoiding the guilt or shame, unlike a normal apology.
“If only” thinking
Replaying an event and imagining how it could have gone differently, called counterfactual thinking, is common. Baumeister and colleagues found it well documented but not actually defensive. Undoing in the DMRS is narrower: a statement or act that cancels one’s own earlier thought, feeling, or action.

In Personality Styles

These personality styles count undoing among their characteristic defenses:

History

Freud described the pattern in his 1909 case history of the Rat Man, where the stone episode led him to a general observation: “Compulsive acts like this, in two successive stages, of which the second neutralizes the first, are a typical occurrence in obsessional neuroses.” He saw in them two opposing impulses of roughly equal strength, which he had invariably found to be love and hate.

He described it as a distinct technique, “undoing what has been done,” in Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926), alongside isolation. He called it “a negative magic” that tries to “blow away” not just the consequences of an event but the event itself. In obsessional symptoms, one action is cancelled out by a second, “so that it is as though neither action had taken place, whereas, in reality, both have.” He noted that the impulse “shades off into normal behaviour” when a person simply decides to regard an event as not having happened.

Undoing was included in the DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale (1994) and in J. Christopher Perry’s Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, which places it at the obsessional level. The DMRS also looks for it in everyday speech, where undoing appears as statements immediately hedged or reversed.

Reviewing social psychology research, Baumeister, Dale, and Sommer (1998) wrote that “undoing, in the sense of counterfactual thinking, is also well documented but does not serve to defend against the threat.” The obsessional level can also be hard to spot: in a reliability study reported by Di Giuseppe and Perry (2021), untrained raters did well on most DMRS-Q scales, “except for the obsessional defense level.”

Sources