(From: Critical Theory Today by Lois Tyson. Garland, 1999)

"Our unconscious desire not to recognise or change our destructive behaviour-because we have formed our identity around it and because we are afraid of what we will find if we examine it too closely-is served by our defences. Defences are the processes by which we keep the repressed repressed in order to avoid knowing what we feel we can't handle knowing.

Defences include selective perception (hearing and seeing only what we feel we can handle), selective memory (modifying our memories so that we don't feel overwhelmed by them or forgetting painful events entirely), denial (believing that the problem does not exist or the unpleasant incident never happened), avoidance (staying away from people or situations that are liable to make us anxious by stirring up some unconscious-i.e., repressed-experience or emotion), displacement ("taking it out" on someone or something less threatening than the person who caused our fear, hurt, frustration, or anger), and projection (ascribing our fear, problem, or guilty desire to someone else, and condemning them for it, in order to deny that we have it ourselves)."