David the Antisemite Jew

In Psychology class, when we learned about Freud's defense mechanisms, it reminded me of a person who we saw a movie about in Ivrit. Freud's defense mechanisms are more socially acceptable behaviors that you perform unconsciously in order to prevent anxiety. Freud's defense mechanisms are

• Repression: banishes anxiety-arousing thoughts, feelings, and memories from consciousness.

• Regression: an individual faced with anxiety retreats to a previous psychosexual stage, where some physic energy remains fixated.

• Reaction formation: the ego unconsciously switches unacceptable impulses into their opposites.

• Projection: people disguise their own threatening impulses by attributing them to others.

• Displacement: shifts sexual or aggressive impulses toward a more acceptable or less threatening object or person, as when redirecting anger toward a safer outlet.

• Sublimation: people rechannel their unacceptable impulses to a socially approved activity.

• Denial: people refuse to believe or even to perceive painful realities.

In Ivrit class, we learned about a man whose whole family grew up as anti-Semites. The family led groups of antisemitism and told other people about how bad the Jews were and how they are the causes of many horrible things. David, who was the son of a huge anti-Semite father and unknowingly the son of a Jewish mother. So David, unknowingly was a Jew himself. He was a big anti-Semite who was also a Jew.

David's story reminds me of the defense mechanism of reaction formation. The person was an anti-Semite even though he was a Jew. He was acting as an anti-Semite, even though he was unknowingly a Jew. He was unconscious about the fact that he was a Jew, so he acted the opposite of what he actually was.