Denial

Freud and Kübler-Ross's Concepts of Denial

In the early 20th century, denial was central to the writings of Sigmund Freud; it was one of several of his professed psychological defense mechanisms. From this view, denial was potentially dangerous psychologically because a person refused to accept what had occurred in the observable, physical reality as the truth. Denial was a person's blatant disregard for what others could verify as real. For instance, when diagnosed with a terminal illness, the person refuses to believe that life will continue as it was prior to the illness.

Freud believed that denial was one of several defensive reactions to threat that manifested in adulthood from repressed urges and conflicts thought to have occurred in a person's childhood. Freud thought of denial, among other defensive reactions to threat, as a conflict between a person's unconscious motive to maintain pleasure and the idealistic motive to maintain righteousness, that is, to do what is right in the eyes of others. The disruption of hedonic balance sometimes triggers a defense, such as denial in which a person may think, “This is not happening.”

In Freud's view, psychological negation—denial—included anything from the refusal by a person to accept a character in a dream as a symbol of one's mother, to the failure by individuals to accept their current emotional states as unpleasant. In denial, someone attempted, albeit unknowingly, to reconcile the discrepancy between what the person desired with the reality of the actual occurrence or with others' expectations. In sum, Freud's notion of denial is broad. It occurred beneath a person's awareness; hence, the psychoanalytic therapist would attempt to facilitate the person through the acceptance of that which the person defensively denied.

Later in the 20th century, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross narrowed the scope of denial to personal loss, such as during bereavement. Among her five stages of grieving, she posited denial to occur first. When dealing with the loss of a close relation, Kübler-Ross suggested that individuals implicitly or explicitly engage in a process of refusing to accept the fact of loss, “This can't be happening to me!” The passage of a person from life to death often provokes intense feelings of sadness, and even trauma. From this view, denial occurs naturally, consequent to someone or something perceived as gone, a barrier between intense discomfort and the person's sense of self.

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