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Personality / Capacities

Defensive Functioning

Defenses are the mostly automatic ways the mind protects itself from feelings, wishes, memories, and facts that would otherwise be too much. Everyone has them and everyone needs them. Defensive functioning, the ninth capacity on the PDM-3’s M Axis, describes how a person characteristically handles anxiety, shame, grief, and other painful states, and how much those strategies bend reality along the way (Lingiardi, Muzi, & Bornstein, 2026, pp. 713, 725).

Nancy McWilliams (2011, pp. 100–101) calls the word “defense” unfortunate, because it suggests something pathological. What we call defenses in adults begin as healthy, creative adaptations and keep working adaptively throughout life. They usually serve one or both of two aims: managing a threatening feeling, and maintaining self-esteem. The question this capacity asks is not whether someone defends, but how: with how much flexibility, how much awareness, and how much distortion.

This site has a page for each of the 30 defenses in J. Christopher Perry’s Defense Mechanism Rating Scales (DMRS), the research instrument PDM-3 treats as the gold standard for this capacity (Lingiardi et al., 2026, p. 735). This page explains how those individual defenses add up to an overall rating.

Across the Range

PDM-3 rates the capacity from 5 (healthy) to 1 (severely impaired), with descriptions at 5, 3, and 1. Paraphrased (Lingiardi et al., 2026, pp. 726–727):

5: Adaptive defenses predominate
Mature defenses dominate, with some neurotic-level ones. The person can feel a broad range of emotions, stay aware of important ideas and motives, and engage the world adaptively and creatively. When neurotic defenses appear, they handle either the emotional or the thinking side of a conflict, one at a time, and the person returns to higher-level defenses as stress eases.
3: Problems located outside
Under stress, the person tends to see problems as external and to minimize their own part, distorting reality somewhat. They may disavow experience through denial, rationalization, or projection, or mask painful experiences such as powerlessness, disappointment, or shame by idealizing or devaluing self or others or by keeping up an illusion of omnipotence. Neurotic defenses are available, but the most stressful moments bring a slide to more immature ones.
1: Overwhelmed
The person is often flooded by fears of falling apart, harm, or death. Reality may be grossly distorted, through processes such as delusional projection, psychotic denial, or fragmentation. These strategies may push others away or lead them to step in and take control to help contain the person’s anxiety. In calmer periods the person may manage with splitting-based defenses but slides back under stress.

The manual adds that defenses vary with mood and situation, that even stable defensive functioning can deteriorate under severe stress, and that more psychologically minded people have more insight into their own defenses (p. 726).

The DMRS hierarchy and the PDM rating

The DMRS, developed by Perry to operationalize George Vaillant’s hierarchy of defenses, defines 30 defenses and arranges them in seven levels, from least to most adaptive (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021; Lingiardi et al., 2026, p. 735):

The levels group into three categories: immature (levels 1–4), neurotic (5–6), and mature (7). From a person’s proportions of each, the DMRS computes an Overall Defensive Functioning (ODF) score, a weighted average running from 1 to 7 (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021). PDM-3 notes that six psychotic defenses have been added at a “level 0,” extending the scale to 0–7 (Lingiardi et al., 2026, p. 735).

The PDM rating and the ODF are not the same measurement. The ODF is calculated from many defenses observed in session transcripts; the PDM rating is a single clinical judgment. But the PDM anchors borrow the DMRS’s language. Di Giuseppe and Perry (2021) describe neurotic-category defenses as letting a person deal with either the emotional or the cognitive side of a stressor, one at a time, and mature defenses as integrating feelings with ideas, close to the wording of PDM-3’s level 5. In our reading (an approximate mapping, not an official conversion), a 5 corresponds to a profile dominated by level 7 with some levels 5–6; a 3 to heavy reliance on the disavowal and minor image-distorting levels (3–4), with dips lower under stress; and a 1 to the psychotic level 0 plus the major image-distorting level 2. Di Giuseppe and Perry place an ODF below 4 in the range seen in severe depression or personality disorders.

The PDM’s own lists differ from the DMRS in places. PDM-3 counts identification among mature adaptations, and withdrawal, somatization, omnipotent control, and extreme dissociation among primitive ones (Lingiardi et al., 2026, p. 726). Somatization and withdrawal are not among the DMRS’s 30 defenses (though a psychotic form, autistic withdrawal, appears among the psychotic-level defenses PDM-3 lists from Berney and colleagues; McWilliams & Shedler, 2026, p. 660), omnipotent control is related to but not the same as DMRS omnipotence (level 4), and the DMRS places dissociation at the neurotic level. PDM-3 also lists rationalization among neurotic-level processes, although its own level-3 description groups it with denial and projection, as the DMRS does. The PDC-3 rating form uses yet another scale, rating “level of defenses” from 1 to 10 with example defenses for psychotic (1–2), borderline (3–5), neurotic (6–8), and healthy (9–10) ranges (Gordon & Bornstein, 2025).

How It Develops

Defenses mature in a rough sequence. Phoebe Cramer’s research shows denial appearing very early, projection later, and identification later still, and her review of the empirical literature supports the idea that defenses operate outside awareness, develop in predictable order, are present in normal personality, increase under stress, and are linked to psychopathology when used excessively (McWilliams, 2011, p. 102). Which defenses a person comes to favor reflects temperament, early stresses, what caregivers modeled, and what has worked in the past (p. 101).

PDM-3’s adolescent chapter describes the most adaptive and complex defenses emerging in adolescence and young adulthood. Denial, projection, and splitting remain common in early adolescence; idealization, devaluation, and omnipotence may intensify in mid-adolescence as ways of regulating self-esteem; and by late adolescence, high-functioning teenagers rely more on sublimation, humor, affiliation, self-assertion, and intellectualization (Tanzilli & Malberg, 2026, pp. 439–440). Like adults, adolescents come to “specialize” in certain defenses (p. 440).

In later life, losses and illness can push people toward more familiar or more costly defenses, though those with favorable circumstances and positive past experiences may show higher-level defensive functioning and more capacity to reflect (Del Corno & Plotkin, 2026, p. 913). PDM-3 also notes that parents’ defenses shape how they perceive and respond to their children and can be transmitted across generations (Lingiardi et al., 2026, p. 751).

How It Shows Up in Personality

McWilliams (2011, p. 100) observes that a character diagnosis is a kind of shorthand for a person’s habitual defensive pattern. Each style page on this site has a Defenses section; for instance, she identifies idealization and devaluation as the defenses people with a narcissistic style depend on most (p. 180), and omnipotent control as the primary defense in psychopathic psychology (p. 160).

Level of organization matters even more for this capacity. At the healthy level, people have favored defenses but enough flexibility to meet challenging realities (McWilliams & Shedler, 2026, p. 657). At the neurotic level, problematic defenses tend to be confined to one area of difficulty. At the borderline level, splitting, projection, and projective identification predominate, along with denial, omnipotent control, acting out, and severe dissociation (pp. 657–659). The psychotic level involves psychotic denial, delusional projection, distortion, and fragmentation (p. 660). The PDM-3 personality chapter adds a striking point: because neurotic-level people also use primitive defenses under stress, what distinguishes borderline from neurotic organization may be less the presence of costly defenses than the relative absence of mature ones (p. 658).

Defensive functioning overlaps with adaptation and resilience, self-esteem regulation, and impulse regulation (Lingiardi et al., 2026, p. 735). PDM-3 notes that the most mature defenses shade into conscious coping strategies (p. 726).

How Different Thinkers See It

Sigmund and Anna Freud

Freud first observed defenses such as repression, conversion, and dissociation in their costliest form, in patients trying to avoid unbearable pain, which is why the concept acquired its negative cast (McWilliams, 2011, pp. 100–101). After introducing the structural model, he reversed an earlier view and concluded that repression is a response to anxiety rather than its cause. Anna Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936) gave the most elegant account of the ego defending against anxiety from drives, from reality, and from conscience (pp. 30–31).

Ego psychology

Ego psychologists added two lasting ideas: that some defenses are more mature than others, and that health involves using a variety of defenses rather than reacting to every stress the same way (McWilliams, 2011, p. 29). Rigidity, or “character armor” in Wilhelm Reich’s phrase, became a marker of difficulty in its own right.

George Vaillant

Vaillant’s longitudinal research produced a hierarchy of adaptive mechanisms and argued that a person’s defensive style belongs in a diagnostic formulation, helping the clinician see what is adaptive as well as maladaptive in the person’s distortions (Vaillant, 1971, 1994). He proposed the DSM-IV Defensive Functioning Scale as a possible metric of positive mental health, linking the defenses at its mature end, altruism, suppression, humor, anticipation, and sublimation, to positive psychology, and reported that maturity of defenses is largely independent of social class, education, and IQ (Vaillant, 2000).

J. Christopher Perry

Perry operationalized Vaillant’s hierarchy as the DMRS, an observer-rated method for scoring defenses in session transcripts (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021). In a study of 21 adults in long-term dynamic psychotherapy, overall defensive functioning improved (though it remained below the healthy–neurotic range), and change in defenses over the first two and a half years predicted improvements in functioning and symptoms at five years (Perry & Bond, 2012).

Phoebe Cramer

Cramer has focused on the developmental and empirical side: defenses emerging at different ages, gender differences in defense use, and the relationship of defenses to psychotherapy and the therapeutic alliance (Cramer, 2015).

Kernberg and McWilliams

Following Kernberg, many therapists treat withdrawal, denial, omnipotent control, primitive idealization and devaluation, projective and introjective identification, and splitting as intrinsically primitive; McWilliams added extreme dissociation, somatization, acting out, and sexualization. In her framing, primary defenses involve the boundary between self and world, while secondary defenses deal with boundaries inside the self (McWilliams, 2011, p. 102).

Examples

A teaching profile from the DMRS-Q

Di Giuseppe and Perry illustrate their Q-sort with a session in which the patient dismisses meaningful topics, complains that others don’t care despite evidence that they have tried to help, resists influence through silence, and claims to feel nothing about distressing events. The resulting profile was mostly immature, especially disavowal, with help-rejecting complaining, passive aggression, projective identification, projection, rationalization, and denial most prominent. The ODF fell below 4. The authors read this as a person who sees problems as externally caused rather than engaging inner conflicts.

Di Giuseppe & Perry, The Hierarchy of Defense Mechanisms (2021), Table 10 and discussion

Martin: two scales, one person

In the PDM-3 online supplement, Martin is a 39-year-old man whose central defenses are described as avoidance, displacement, intellectualization, and rationalization; his therapist felt helpless before his intellectualizing. On the PDC-3 he received a 6 for level of defenses on the 1–10 scale, the lower edge of the neurotic range, and a 3 for defensive functioning on the M Axis.

Lingiardi & McWilliams (Eds.), PDM-3 Online Supplement (2026), pp. 30–36

Grace: idealization loosening

Grace, another supplement case, came to therapy grieving a partner she saw as perfect. After a few weeks she was able to question that idealization and feel anger and disappointment at how he had ended things. Her chart rated her level of defenses at 9 and her M-Axis defensive functioning at 4.

Lingiardi & McWilliams (Eds.), PDM-3 Online Supplement (2026), pp. 47–53

History

Defense is one of psychoanalysis’s oldest ideas. Freud named several defenses in his work with hysterical patients, and Anna Freud’s 1936 book systematized them (McWilliams, 2011, pp. 30, 100). Ego psychology reframed defenses as part of the ego’s adaptive toolkit and introduced the idea of a maturity hierarchy.

Empirical research gathered pace with Vaillant’s longitudinal studies (Vaillant, 1971) and Perry’s DMRS (Perry, 1990). Research of this kind persuaded the American Psychiatric Association to include a provisional axis for defenses, the Defensive Functioning Scale, in DSM-IV (1994). DSM-5 dropped it (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021). The DMRS lineage has since produced a Q-sort version for clinicians (Di Giuseppe, Perry, Petraglia, Janzen, & Lingiardi, 2014) and a 30-item self-report (Di Giuseppe et al., 2020).

The PDM carried the concept forward as one of its mental capacities. PDM-3 recommends the DMRS family of measures for this capacity and for assessing level of personality organization, and notes the proposal by some authors to add a psychotic level of defenses (Lingiardi et al., 2026, p. 735).

Sources