Ministers of Defense (Mechanisms): A guide to the psychological defense mechanisms we all share and how autocrats weaponize them
Statue of a Young Satyr Wearing a Theater Mask of Silenos (Roman, 1st century AD)
This is a reprint of my guest post from The Freedom Academy with Asha Rangappa. It accompanied the video of our Substack Live conversation on Monday May 11, 2026 where we discussed psychological defense mechanisms – what they are, how and why they form, why they can become maladaptive, and the ramifications on all of us when an autocratic leader and his enablers weaponize these mental distortions. You can access, re-stack, and leave comments on the video and original post on Asha's Subtack here: https://asharangappa.substack.com/p/ministers-of-defense-mechanisms
On the March 9, 1954 broadcast of his landmark TV show “See It Now,“ Edward R. Murrow told the nation, speaking of Senator Joseph McCarthy, “No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.”[1]
The ‘we’ Murrow was referring to is everyone – all of us. And the issue he was calling out was why we would let ourselves become complicit in terrorism. Then as now, many decisions are shaped by our psychologies, mixtures of individual and collective motivations, aims, and personal histories. How we perceive and process our experiences of the world. What we’re drawn to or step away from. A reality that’s familiar and we prefer, or can normalize and accept, versus one that we object to and refuse.
Many of us are unaware of those unconscious emotional forces and how they shape decision-making and behavior. There’s usually no pressing need to think about it. Most of the time, we make good enough decisions and generally make our way alright, hopefully keeping own goals and cataclysmic choices to a minimum. But not always. We take risks we shouldn’t and overestimate our abilities. We turn right when we intend to go left, tie our shoelaces together at the worst moment, and serially repeat the same mistakes. People often dismiss these as blunders or a momentary lapse. Sure, sometimes. But considered more deeply, they’re an unintended behavioral communication of something inside us we hadn’t recognized or acknowledged – and sometimes, an indicator or symptom of psychological distress or disorder. They also give rise to any number of unintended consequences.
Some of those consequences may not be immediately obvious but can turn out to be life-changing or world-altering – including turning a blind eye to whom we put or allow into positions of power.
Institutions and societies are complex. How they function is less the influence of a single individual and more the consequence of multiple intertwining factors, the result of nesting decisions and processes involving many people. But people – citizens of a nation and workers inside organizational ecosystems – naturally adapt to the needs and expectations of the central figure. Culture is not just the tone from the top but how everyone responds to it.
So it’s intuitively sensible that organizations and nation-states alike would be better off with someone psychologically balanced, mature, and emotionally and socially intelligent at the helm. After all, it’s a recipe for disaster when the leader is beset by unresolved conflicts or hobbled by a psychological disorder, whose emotional instabilities drive impulsive, erratic behavior, and behaves like a mad king.
But when that’s who you have, certain things happen. One is that he won’t be the only one you have to deal with. Autocratic capture, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat has explained, is a process in which the ascent of a disturbed and destructive leader forces the state’s administrative and governance ecosystem to undergo a transfusion. Important institutions staffed by competent, experienced, career professionals are replaced by supplicants who know their actual job is to satisfy the whims of the self-serving Poohbah. In addition, as Timothy Snyder makes plain in his 2017 book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, many people will simply obey in advance, becoming volunteer loyalists without a fuss or whimper. Unfortunately, there’s never a shortage of them.
What’s to be done when we find ourselves stuck in a mess of our own making? One job is to clearly assess what’s happening. No sugar-coating or over-simplifying. Another is to unearth the root causes of how and why it happened. That can be painstaking. As Peter G. Neumann, a computer-science researcher, observed, “complex systems break in complex ways.” Many factors will have contributed; there’s no single failure point and no single solution.
There is, however, a common element: our psychological tendencies, as I’ve already mentioned, to unconsciously accept or move toward emotionally familiar people and situations (often even despite disagreeing with their decisions and behavior). Many elements inside us drive that system. I want to spotlight one: defense mechanisms.
Defense mechanisms are features of our minds that buffer us against anxiety, guilt, or other various painful or disturbing emotions. Freud introduced “defenses” as a term and concept in his 1894 paper, “The Neuro-Psychoses of Defense.” In the decades since, research and clinical data have led to delineating distinct types and categories of defenses. The primary ones are listed and defined here:
Denial – The repudiation of ideas and facts to avoid awareness of a distressing or painful reality. It plays a normal role in childhood and at any age a degree of transient denial is an expectable reaction to trauma, loss, or upset. It typically involves a fantasy that erases unwelcome facts and replaces them with a more pleasing counter-narrative.
Negation – More than denial. A belief and declaration that something does not exist or is a statement of a reversal – ‘this is not that’ or ‘I’m not hurting you’ or ‘you’re wrong not me’ – that embeds an unacknowledged admission or reveals a wish. It is a false manufactured substitution that seeks to neutralize the impact of something in reality.
Disavowal – A means of eradicating (in fantasy) the existence of one thing (in reality) so it can be replaced (in fantasy) with something else preferred. In perversion it could become a fetish object. Or in psychosis, a remodeling of reality whereby anything can be anything you need it to be (for you).
Repression – The banishment of unacceptable mental content (a wish, an idea) from consciousness. Its function is to ward off the anxiety that would be consciously felt if the forbidden mental content reached consciousness. It is an unconscious system and so cannot be controlled at will. The “return of the repressed” is an unconscious eruption or disclosure that is evidenced in symptoms, slips or mistakes, dreams, behaviors.
Suppression – The conscious, deliberate, and voluntary act of pushing uncomfortable thoughts, emotions, or impulses out of awareness. A functional strategy that can, from a positive perspective, facilitate temporary but effective self-management of anxiety, stress, distraction, etc. But maladaptive and inhibiting when used continuously as an avoidance strategy.
Dissociation – The disconnection of thoughts, memories, or feelings (akin to compartmentalization) from disturbing causes as a protective shield against overwhelming trauma or unbearable stress. A system on a spectrum. At low levels it’s a sort of zoning-out or momentary daydreaming. But in more severe cases, a structural separation partitions off awareness or aspects of the self in the world leading to depersonalization (feeling detached from oneself), derealization (feeling the world is unreal), and memory gaps or amnesia.
Splitting – A mental model that helps explain several defense mechanisms. It describes how an individual can ‘split’ off different categories of consciousness such that the person can behave as though they have not noticed or don’t believe something that has been factually verified and is thus otherwise actually known. It can also refer to splitting other people (or groups) into distinct categories – good or bad – at will so that certain people (or groups) can be maintained while others attacked and discarded without any feeling of contradiction (or cognitive dissonance).
Magical Thinking – A belief in the omnipotence of thoughts, typical of early childhood when cognitive capabilities and reality testing are still underdeveloped, in which there’s a powerful belief that one’s internal mental state directly dictates reality. It can also provide a false sense of control in unpredictable situations. It is a highly maladaptive and potentially dangerous coping mechanism often indicative of deeper psychological disturbances.
Displacement – Shifts the focus or emphasis connected to a feeling or interest designated as unacceptable to something or someone else associated as being more tolerable.
Reaction Formation – Flips a painful idea or feeling to its opposite, for example mentally transforming hatefulness or sadistic urges into behavior that conveys extreme solicitousness and concern.
Undoing – Thoughts and, often, behaviors that in fantasy attempt to remove (not merely cover over) offensive or prohibited acts, usually through a process of ritual atonement or self-punishment.
Isolation – Separates a painful idea or event from the feelings associated with it to alter or diminish its emotional impact. That unlinking removes the discomfort of responsibility (such as guilt) and creates both an affective (emotional) and cognitive (intellectual) disconnect between cause and effect so that awareness of the consequence of an act can be recategorized as completely separate from the actual cause.
Projection – A mental operation by which feelings and desires that somebody needs to reject or refuse to recognize are treated as if they exist in or emanate from something or somebody else. Related to disavowal except that unacceptable feelings and wishes remain but are not one’s own and belong (in fantasy) to another.
Projective Identification – A complex relational defense involving one person (the projector) unconsciously projecting unwanted emotions or objectionable attitudes onto (or into) another person (the recipient), then inducing the recipient – through pressure or manipulation – into accepting and unconsciously adopting and experiencing the projected feelings – to identify with them – causing the recipient to then behave as if those emotions are genuinely his or hers rather than belonging to the projector. Not to be confused with ‘Projection’ even though it contains that term. Projection attributes a feeling to another person while projective identification involves forcing the other person to feel and act on it.
Defenses are one of the ways we selectively distort reality in our minds as an unconscious means of avoiding acknowledgement of unpleasant or painful facts, thoughts, or realities. They protect us from feeling, thinking, remembering, or even knowing things about ourselves and others, and to try to control people and situations to help us feel safe, powerful, or important.
That’s not all bad. In fact, defenses are essential, normal psychological dispositions shared by everyone. Most defense mechanisms constructively facilitate efficient thought and action and provide temporary comfort or relief. We all need and use them in our lives, like the reflex to close our eyelids in bright light or the way antibodies help ward against our bodies being overrun by infection.
But human psychology isn’t always straightforward. Defense mechanisms function along a spectrum and, especially in conjunction with personality disorders or other psychopathologies, can generate dysfunction and transition from shield to sword.
That can occur because these mental devices involve the denial of a universe of normal and situationally appropriate emotions and responses and so are fundamentally maladaptive, especially when embedded as a monolithic default. They inhibit or obstruct the recognition and addressing of important realities, however difficult they may be to experience. Frequently, the insistence that only one class of emotions and behavior is acceptable suggests a dread of the others (this is obvious in xenophobia where in-groups and out-groups are classified as good and bad, respectively). This gives rise to a restricted, hobbled repertoire for responding to the diversity of natural, unavoidable experiences and life events.
This type of fundamentalist credo goes something like this: “There are things in the world and people in it that upset me. The only solution is to destroy that world and reshape as I need it to be and punish or banish those other people.” The potential viability of that as an action plan, not a passing fantasy to be nursed for a moment and then dismissed, is a delusion, a feature of omnipotent narcissistic grandiosity – a disorder involving magical thinking but often expanding into more severe pathologies.
In other words, ideology is informed by psychology. This perspective helps us see into some of the psychopathologies that typically bind together authoritarians, despots, and mafiosi with zealots, abusers, and extremists, as well as their lieutenants, sycophants, and enablers.
Freud wrote in 1905 that “He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.” By which he meant that our symptoms – anxiety, depression, substance abuse, addiction, behavioral outbursts and collapses, chronic discontent or emotional deadness (anhedonia), serial entanglements in combative situations, love, involvement, or support for somebody cruel and debasing – are telling a story we don’t want told, that we can’t bear to confront…but that cannot be kept under wraps.
The shared ambitions of certain world leaders and their minions and supporters to control, crush, oppress, desecrate, demean, punish, shame, and excise aren’t tools they learned from a manifesto. They’re expressions – an unleashing – of impulses rooted in their own personal lacerating experiences. Many people – not only those in positions of significant power and influence but also those enthralled by and compliant to them – present what to trained experts are typically indicative of profound early trauma and psychological (or other) abuses. Of course, individual situations and experiences are ultimately unique. But if you look closely, and understand what certain indicators commonly suggest, you can see through the disguise – the outer jacket of a defense structure – to the helplessness, psychological impotence, and foundational damage under it. For example, constant taunts, threats, and belligerence serve to project the appearance of ferocity, but are a distraction, a fraud, to dupe us into believing there is strength, not terror and ineffectualness. Or, someone who shames and debases must be morbidly petrified of humiliation, living in a maelstrom of fear and outrage. Trained mental health professionals understand that certain responses – modes of presenting psychologically and behaviorally -- are indicative of certain defenses which in turn nearly always suggest certain causal dysfunctions.
To be in relationships with such people means being subjected to their intense unrelenting demand to control and delimit. Censorship, bans, expulsions, curtailing or reversing rights and freedoms are more than acts in service of an extremist ultraconservative ideological agenda, but policy-based iterations of emotional imperatives. They are a means of preemptively and comprehensively protecting – defense by annihilation – against negative emotions and anything or anyone that might cause them.
Everyone is affected. Not just by ruinous policies, executive orders, and judicial rulings. But environmentally, relationally, emotionally. Flooding the zone, wrecking vital and beloved institutions and values at muzzle velocity, and putting groups of people into states of distress isn’t just a socio-political tactic. It’s psychological warfare. It’s also a form of malevolent creativity used – and countenanced and/or applauded – by people who are comfortable with (syntonic is the technical term), indifferent to, or delight in others’ pain and who can live and breathe in chaotic, disordered states. These are people for whom destabilization and fear are familiar. Even if that seems and feels normal and livable (defense mechanisms can be very effective), it can only entail suffering.
To elevate an autocrat – an individual who by definition is a textbook case of severe grandiose pathological (or malignant) narcissism usually co-existent with psychopathy (antisocial personality disorder) – means that the populace, or large portions of it, must feel narcissistically injured. They are longing for recognition, validation, of their deprivation and pain, and also for real relief and redress. They’re eager to surrender to a figure who tells them he, and he alone, understands and will take care of everything. All will be not just ok but great. It’s the answer to a prayer. It’s also straight out of the authoritarian playbook – the prayer he’s ready to answer. And then betray.
This circles back to Murrow’s injunction to consider what we have allowed. How we’re all complicit. For those currents to merge – a desperate populace responsive to a snake-oil salesman – means there’s been widescale chronic suffering: multigenerational trauma stemming from structural prejudice and social inequities, deprivations of every kind, abuses and violations of all sorts, among many other factors -- which has been ignored, denied, minimized, and left unaddressed.
Emile Zola spoke to this in his 1898 testimony in the Dreyfus Affair: “If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.”
Hopefully, more of us are willing and able to understand how real that is. Returning to the question of what we can do, my call to action is for all of us to look more deeply at ourselves, to become more self-aware as well as more psychologically literate. To see that what we all try to avoid, to protect ourselves against, can sometimes become the very thing we participate in creating. To know that love and care are ultimately vastly more powerful and sustainable than hatred, and that part of that care involves being courageous: in speaking truth to power, speaking up when others want silence, protecting children and others who are vulnerable and dependent, and confronting something – even within ourselves – we think we can’t bear.
And, finally, we must hold in mind what the late opposition leader Alexei Navalny instructed at the end of his life to all who oppose oppression and injustice: “You’re not allowed to give up.”
End Note & Disclaimer:
Section 7.3 of the American Psychiatric Association (APA)’s Principles of Medical Ethics with Annotations Especially Applicable to Psychiatry, adopted in 1973 and known informally as the Goldwater Rule, prohibits psychiatrists from diagnosing public figures without a personal examination and without consent.
It is important to note that I have not met with or interviewed any individuals implicitly suggested in this article. Any resemblance to real persons is purely coincidental and is intended solely as a generic illustration of how the mental devices discussed present behaviorally and to explain the effects they can have on decisions, situations, and other people. Nothing written here should be misconstrued as any form of clinical assessment or speculative diagnosis.
Resources:
Ben-Ghiat, R. (April 21, 2025). Is America an Autocracy Now?
Clark, C. (April 24, 2026). No Need to Break the Goldwater Rule. Here’s What Docs Propose Instead — There’s a difference between diagnosis from afar, and raising clinically informed concerns. MedPage Today
Diamond, D., Kernberg, O. F., et al (2023). Treating Pathological Narcissism with Transference Focused Psychotherapy. Guilford Press
Freud, S. (1894). The neuro-psychoses of defence. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 3, pp. 41-61
Freud, S. (1905 [1901]). Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 7, pp. 1–122
Nicholl D, Greenhalgh T. (22 April 2026). Should doctors speak of their concerns about the mental health of a president?BMJ 2026; 393
O’Toole, F. (May 14, 2026). The Right Amount of Crazy. The New York Review of Books.
Rangappa, A. (April 27, 2026). An FBI Director on the Rocks. https://asharangappa.substack.com/p/an-fbi-director-on-the-rocks
Snyder, T. (2017). On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. NY: Crown
Stein, A. (November 8, 2018). Donald Trump’s Leadership Clinic: How to Disguise Impotence as Power. Forbes.
Stein, A. (Jan 27, 2021). How To Become A Malevolent Leader: A Field Guide for Aspiring Fraudsters and Tyrants. Forbes
Stein, A. (2023). Innovations and Strategic Applications in the Psychology of Fraud. 2023 ICC FraudNet Global Report — Fraud and Asset Recovery in an Unstable World
Stein, A. (August 2025). Educating Psychodynamically Minded Leaders. Psyche on Campus. University of Pennsylvania.
Zola, E. 13 January 1898. J’Accuse...!. L’Aurore Paris.
[1] A recent cultural response is the 2005 film “Good Night, and Good Luck,” directed by George Clooney and the 2025 Broadway stage production directed by David Cromer. On a personal note, Shirley Wershba, who with her husband Joseph Wershba, worked with Edward Murrow on See It Now is a close family relation. Now approaching 103 years of age, Shirley remains a vital and ferocious advocate for journalistic integrity and freedom of the press. She was portrayed by Patricia Clarkson the film version and by Ilana Glazer on stage.
