In psychoanalytic theory, ego defenses are unconscious processes that we deploy to diffuse the fear and anxiety that arise when who we think we are or who we think we should be (our conscious ‘superego’) comes into conflict with who we really are (our unconscious ‘id’).

Sigmund Freud first formulated the concept of denial. His daughter Anna thought of it as an immature ego defence, first, because it is especially used in

In her classic of 1969, On Death and Dying, the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced a model of bereavement that is commonly referred to as the Five Stages of Grief. ...

Denial, probably the most basic of ego defences, is the simple refusal to admit to certain unacceptable or unmanageable aspects of reality, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. An example of denial is a middle-aged physician who ignores the classic ...

It is often difficult to verify the existence of an ego defence, but a person’s denial in the face of hard evidence to the contrary can easily be spotted by almost anyone else.

Problems arise in the absence of hard evidence, not only because the denial can no l...

People might move back and forth between the stages, often several times and at great speed, or they might get stuck in one of the earlier stages, failing to come to terms with their loss or fate. The model has been criticized on a number of grounds, but Kübler-Ross did emphasize...