Description
Intellectualization is a 'flight into reason', where the person avoids uncomfortable emotions by focusing on facts and logic. The situation is treated as an interesting problem that engages the person on a rational basis, whilst the emotional aspects are completely ignored as being relevant.
'Freud did not use the term "intellectualization" in any of his writings, but his awareness that the intellectual functions may be used for the purposes of defence shows in many places'. In On Negation he described clinical instances in which 'the intellectual function is separated from the affective process....The outcome of this is a kind of intellectual acceptance of the repressed, while at the same time what is essential to the repression persists'. Freud also described an unsuccessful analysis which 'went forward almost without any signs of resistance, the patient participating actively with her intellect, though absolutely tranquil emotionally...completely indifferent'.
Anna Freud devoted a chapter of her book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence to "Intellectualization at Puberty", seeing the way the 'increased intellectual, scientific, and philosophical interests of the period represent attempts at mastering the drives and the connected emotions' as relatively normal. She considered that only 'if the process of intellectualization overruns the whole field of mental life' might it be 'already pathological'.
Jargon is often used as a device of intellectualization. By using complex terminology, the focus becomes on the words and finer definitions rather than the human effects.
Intellectualization protects against anxiety by repressing the emotions connected with an event. A comparison sometimes made is that between isolation (also known as 'isolation of affect') and intellectualization. The former is a dissociative response that allows one to dispassionately experience an unpleasant thought or event. The latter is a cognitive style that seeks to conceptualize an unpleasant thought or event in an intellectually comprehensible manner. . It allows one to rationally deal with a situation, but may cause suppression of feelings that need to be acknowledged to move on.
Read more about this topic: Intellectualization
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“I fancy it must be the quantity of animal food eaten by the English which renders their character insusceptible of civilisation. I suspect it is in their kitchens and not in their churches that their reformation must be worked, and that Missionaries of that description from [France] would avail more than those who should endeavor to tame them by precepts of religion or philosophy.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“An intentional object is given by a word or a phrase which gives a description under which.”
—Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (b. 1919)
“Why does philosophy use concepts and why does faith use symbols if both try to express the same ultimate? The answer, of course, is that the relation to the ultimate is not the same in each case. The philosophical relation is in principle a detached description of the basic structure in which the ultimate manifests itself. The relation of faith is in principle an involved expression of concern about the meaning of the ultimate for the faithful.”
—Paul Tillich (1886–1965)