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Psychoanalysts call it negation: bringing up threatening material and denying it in the same breath. A woman sitting down with a married man for the first time heard him announce that he was not going to leave his wife. She had not asked, and she had only just met him.
A daughter who could not separate from her mother told her that she and her boyfriend were getting married. The mother answered that it was amazing, mentioned a yoga retreat scheduled for exactly that date, and added that she didn't want to ruin her daughter's big moment. A psychoanalyst hears a refusal in that last line.
The pattern turns up in ordinary life too. A business email once insisted three times that the sender was not threatening the recipient. Psychoanalysis listens for what people leave unsaid, or say in ways that show the defense more than the actual feeling, because most people express defenses far more often than feelings.
Where did the idea of negation come from?
Sigmund Freud wrote a short paper called Negation in 1925. In it he described patients who said of a figure in a dream, it is not my mother, and he noted that the analyst takes this as confirmation that it is. He argued that denial lets a person become aware of a repressed thought while still refusing to accept it. The paper runs only a few pages.
Where does "protests too much" come from?
The line comes from Shakespeare's Hamlet, written around 1600. In the play within the play, an actor portrays a queen who swears lavishly that she will never remarry after her husband dies. Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, watches and remarks that the lady doth protest too much. The phrase has since become a standard way to describe a denial that sounds like an admission.
Why do defenses show more than feelings?
Anna Freud, Sigmund's daughter, catalogued the ego's defenses in her 1936 book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. She described around ten of them, including repression, projection, reversal, and turning against the self. Her argument was that analysts could read a person's inner conflicts from the defenses on display, since the feelings themselves stay out of view. She spent most of her career in London after her family fled Vienna in 1938.
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