Anna Freud Image by Getty Images

By PJ Grisar July 5, 2018

On July 4, 2018, Open Culture featured a video from Alain de Botton’s School of Life Youtube series wherein Freud’s favorite daughter, Anna, swats away blowfish and frolics among cutouts of a drunkard, a dejected child and a mustachioed gymnast with a bib and pacifier. It’s quite the ride.

The six and a half minute video is a whimsical primer on Anna Freud’s thinking, outlining the origins of her 10 Defense Mechanisms. Through tweening, Terry Gilliam-style animation, Denial, Projection and Rationalization all get their due, drawing from Freud’s 1934 book “The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense.”

The vocabulary Anna Freud established made a large impression on the zeitgeist and is, maybe even more so than her father’s theories, subject to abuse (who among us hasn’t accused a significant other of Regression?), so it’s refreshing to see her thoughts pulled from their original context in an accessible way: through examples. An alcoholic denies his drinking problem; a husband projects his insecurity about his earning power onto his wife; an intellectual muses on the Roman Empire instead of confronting his feelings about a recent breakup.

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While some may object to the mixed media approach of using both archival and stock images or, say, the early animation of nude snapshots slipping out of Freud pere’s head, the presentation suits Anna Freud’s own sensibilities. A schoolteacher and advocate of children throughout her life and, as the video puts it, a “tender and generous” writer when explaining her concepts, Freud’s nonjudgmental streak would welcome such a treatment of her ideas.

Freud’s writing states that Defense Mechanisms are natural and something we all revert to (she estimated we deploy about five of them everyday). It’s only natural then, that there should be a video we can all understand so we can better control them moving forward.

PJ Grisar is the Forward’s culture intern

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