Relationship Assessment
When an individual cannot deal with the demands of desires (including sex and love) and reality, anxiety follows. Freud believed that anxiety is an unpleasant inner state that people seek to avoid. In an attempt to protect ourselves from this anxiety, people employ reaction formation unconsciously in their daily lives. Reaction formation involves adopting opposite feelings, impulses or behavior. Someone adopting a reaction formation defense strategy would treat a spouse or loved one in the same manner in which they’d treat a hated enemy. Another example would be that two people really fond of each other fight all the time to suppress their desire of love for each other. This may also occur when there is a failure of acceptance that the other person is really important to them. To suppress their feelings for that person, they may resort to reaction formation and try to hate or fight with their loved ones to avoid the anxiety of not having them around.
Read more about this topic: Reaction Formation
Famous quotes containing the words relationship and/or assessment:
“Every man is in a state of conflict, owing to his attempt to reconcile himself and his relationship with life to his conception of harmony. This conflict makes his soul a battlefield, where the forces that wish this reconciliation fight those that do not and reject the alternative solutions they offer. Works of art are attempts to fight out this conflict in the imaginative world.”
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