How many defense mechanisms are there in psychology. One particular source speaks of 31 such mechanisms. But it all began with three— denial, projection, and repression—and they have a common denominator.
A simple denial means that you deny that something happened. It is so traumatic that you can’t cope with it and therefore you deny that it ever happened. Projection is that I project something I am feeling on someone else. It is also denial: I am willing to admit that it happened, but I didn’t do it—so I project it on someone else. Repression is to remove it from my consciousness. If I do so consciously it is called suppression. If it happens “by itself,” it is called repression.
What is the origin in the Torah. The basic example of projection is that I dislike someone (in the world of Formation which is about emotions), so I project it on the person that I dislike, and I build an image that he hates me. That’s the basic example to illustrate projection. It’s about love vs. hatred. This is a classic example of all these defense mechanisms that are mentioned by the sages. It is important for someone to write a book identifying these sayings from the sages to show that these are not something new that was discovered in the past century. This one is so obvious that it is mentioned clearly in a verse, “Because of God’s hate for us, He took us out of Egypt, to hand us over to the Amorites to destroy us.”
This is what the people said after the sin of the spies. Rashi explains that this was a public defense mechanism. The people hated God because of what they heard from the spies, but they could not admit that, so they said, “God hates us.”
There’s even a statement about this: What you feel about your companion is what you say your companion feels about you. This all takes place in the World of Formation. These are all different forms of denial, and they all must be reconciled through proper confession. Confession is acknowledgment. In the world of Creation, I must accept reality as it truly is. In the World of Formation, I must accept my true emotions and not cover them up by projecting them on someone else. In the World of Action, I must confess my deeds.
(excerpted from a class given on 25th of Tammuz, 5779)
