.A young girl recently called for therapy. When asked what is it for, she said, “My work is affecting my family life, I lose my temper at work because of my boss, he shouts and insults me like a moron and I remove all the anger on my younger sister at home, and now, it is affecting my relationship with her, please help!”Haven’t we heard similar stories or even experienced this?
Well, this is a classic example of Displacement.
What is Displacement?
In Freudian psychology, displacement (German: “shift, move”) is an unconscious defense mechanism whereby the mind substitutes either a new aim or a new object for goals felt in their original form to be dangerous or unacceptable.Displacement involves shifting your true feelings from the original, anxiety-provoking source to a less harmful or non-threatening target (based on individual perception).
Why does Displacement occur?Displacement occurs when we shift our emotions and actions from the actual desired target to a substitute target, either due to certain beliefs that we have or due to the circumstances.
Like in the above example, the girl gets extremely angry at her boss, but she can’t do much since she fears losing her job, so in effect the anger is directed at her younger sister who she perceives as a safer target.The intention behind this unconscious defence mechanism is generally to release the pent up emotions by directing it elsewhere, thereby causing less harm or many a times no harm at all to the person feeling those emotions.
However, if we are unaware of this displaced anger, or even if we are aware and the behaviour is often repeated, it could cause serious complications and issues in the person’s life. In the above case, this had already started to happen, as her relationship with her sister was indeed getting adversely affected.In some cases, like the case mentioned above, Displacement may involve retaining the action and simply shifting the target of that action. So, the girl wanted to shout back at her boss but instead displaced the shouting at her sister.However, at times, this way of Displacement might not be feasible.
So in this case, the person may change the action to a target which is similar to the original target; in other words, the second target will resemble the original target in some way. For instance, if I cannot shout at my boss, I would take a punching bag and keep punching it till I feel better.
Displacements are often quite satisfactory and workable mechanisms for releasing energy more safely.Even dreams can be interpreted as the displacement of stored tensions into other forms (dreams are often highly metaphoric) e.g. a mouse hitting a dragon with a hockey stick. Where the dragon is the boss and the mouse is you.Like every defence mechanism, displacement is good in the short run, however it can lead to major complications when this continues in the long run. It is for this reason very important to channelize it in a healthy manner and come up with alternative solutions.