{
    "api": "YAML JSON TOON Database",
    "version": "1.0.0",
    "format": "json",
    "dataset": {
        "slug": "defense-mechanisms",
        "title": "Defense Mechanisms",
        "description": "Psychological strategies used to manage internal conflict.",
        "summary": "Defense mechanisms as described in the psychodynamic tradition that began with Freud and was systematized by Anna Freud and later clinicians: unconscious strategies for managing anxiety and conflict. Each entry is a short description of the move.",
        "use_when": [
            "You are explaining psychodynamic vocabulary or reading clinical or literary material that uses it.",
            "You want a consistent set of named patterns when discussing coping behavior in plain language."
        ],
        "caveats": [
            "This is an interpretive framework from clinical practice, not a list of experimentally isolated mechanisms; it is hard to falsify an individual attribution.",
            "Labeling a specific person's behavior with one of these terms is an inference, not an observation."
        ],
        "related": [
            "attachment-styles",
            "cognitive-biases"
        ],
        "category": "Psychology",
        "category_slug": "psychology",
        "tags": "psychology,defense,psychoanalysis",
        "view_count": 0,
        "entry_count": 20,
        "fields": [
            {
                "section": "data",
                "field": "mechanism",
                "type": "string",
                "example": "Repression"
            },
            {
                "section": "data",
                "field": "description",
                "type": "string",
                "example": "Keeping threatening thoughts from awareness."
            }
        ]
    },
    "data": [
        {
            "mechanism": "Repression",
            "description": "Keeping threatening thoughts from awareness."
        },
        {
            "mechanism": "Denial",
            "description": "Refusing to accept reality or facts."
        },
        {
            "mechanism": "Projection",
            "description": "Attributing one's own unacceptable impulses to others."
        },
        {
            "mechanism": "Displacement",
            "description": "Redirecting emotions from a threatening target to a safer one."
        },
        {
            "mechanism": "Sublimation",
            "description": "Channeling unacceptable impulses into socially acceptable actions."
        },
        {
            "mechanism": "Rationalization",
            "description": "Creating logical explanations to justify behavior."
        },
        {
            "mechanism": "Reaction Formation",
            "description": "Acting opposite to one's true feelings."
        },
        {
            "mechanism": "Regression",
            "description": "Reverting to behavior typical of an earlier developmental stage under stress."
        },
        {
            "mechanism": "Intellectualization",
            "description": "Dealing with an emotional situation through abstract analysis that avoids feeling it."
        },
        {
            "mechanism": "Isolation of Affect",
            "description": "Recalling an event accurately while detaching the emotion that belongs with it."
        },
        {
            "mechanism": "Undoing",
            "description": "Trying to cancel out a perceived wrong with a symbolic act or its opposite."
        },
        {
            "mechanism": "Compensation",
            "description": "Overachieving in one area to offset a perceived weakness in another."
        },
        {
            "mechanism": "Identification",
            "description": "Adopting the qualities of a person or group, often an admired or feared one, to relieve anxiety."
        },
        {
            "mechanism": "Splitting",
            "description": "Seeing people or situations as entirely good or entirely bad, without integrating both."
        },
        {
            "mechanism": "Suppression",
            "description": "Consciously deciding to put a distressing thought aside for later, in contrast to unconscious repression."
        },
        {
            "mechanism": "Humor",
            "description": "Expressing a painful or uncomfortable idea in a way that allows distance and shared relief."
        },
        {
            "mechanism": "Altruism",
            "description": "Meeting one's own needs indirectly by helping others, usually regarded as a mature defense."
        },
        {
            "mechanism": "Dissociation",
            "description": "A temporary disruption in the integration of consciousness, memory or identity under overwhelming stress."
        },
        {
            "mechanism": "Acting Out",
            "description": "Expressing an unconscious conflict through action instead of words or reflection."
        },
        {
            "mechanism": "Passive Aggression",
            "description": "Expressing hostility indirectly through procrastination, sulking or intentional inefficiency."
        }
    ]
}