Defences - Freud vs Rogers - What's the difference?

What follows is poorly written and may be more confusing than beneficial. You have been warned.

While Freud and Rogers were both psychologists they each had very different views on what drove people and how they dealt with inner conflict. While both theorists suggested that people used defences to help alleivate the psychological consequences of inner conflict the nature of these defences varied in a number of ways. These are best understood in terms of the basic view of the person, the source of the conflict, how the conflict is alleviated, and the long term consequences of these actions.

Freud and Rogers disagreed about what motivated people. Freud believed that we had two main drives, one for sex and one for aggression. Unrestricted these drives would produce behaviour that is incompatible with our society and thus these drives needed to be controlled by the superego (rules about what is acceptable in society) and the ego (the middle man responsible for satisfying the id and the superego). As such Freud felt that people were essentially bad and society played in role in making us good.

The conflict between the sexual and aggressive drives of the id and the rules of the superego lead to psychological anxiety. For Freud defence mechanisms were the tools that the ego used to relieve this anxiety. Defence mechanisms allow for the energy from the sexual or aggressive drives to be released in a way that is acceptable to the superego.

Under Freud's theory defence mechanisms are essentially good things. They allow us to go about our daily lives without constantly expressing aggressive or sexual behaviour. Assuming everything functions as it should defence mechanisms can be used long term with no ill effect. In fact defence mechanisms must be used by everyone long term if we want to have a functioning society.

Rogers on the other hand felt that we all had a desire to be the best that we could be; a desire to self actualise. He felt that people's pychological issues were the result of some aspect of society, our environment, or even ourselves, preventing us from being able to follow this tendency. To Rogers then people are essentially good.

For Rogers defences are things that we use in order to fool ourselves into thinking that our actions are in line with who we think we are/who we want to be. Defences allow us to continue to think that we are moving towards being our ideal selves.

Unfortunately though with long term use of defences it is possible for people to lose track of who they are. As defences are used more and more the gap between the ideal self (who we want to be) and the actual self (who we are) widens. The gap between these two versions of ourselves is termed incongruence and greater incocngruence indicates poorer psychological wellbeing. Ironically then Rogers defencces are not particularly beneficial to those that use them.