Do Defense Mechanisms Change With Age? A Study of Age Variations and Further Explorations of Defense Mechanisms

Defense mechanisms are used to protect the self from feelings of anxiety or guilt. They are not under one’s conscious control and are involuntary and adjective functions of the mind. This also implies that with change in situations, experiences and age, there is a possibility of change in types and extent of defense mechanisms used by a person. This paper aims to justify that as an internal form of conflict resolution, the study and evaluation of these defense mechanisms could be the key to gauging the most successful and widely used coping mechanisms, and implementing them into fields of youth studies, geriatric studies and more, for maximum wellbeing. This paper takes the aide of The Defense Mechanism Inventory (DMI-MS), which measures total defense mechanism and also individual types of defense mechanisms. This scale and the statistical and qualitative analysis of it’s results is used to study the type, extent and impact of the prevailing defense mechanisms used in a comparative review between a sample size of thirty 20 to 30 year old males, and thirty 50 to 60 year old males. This study attempts to ascertain the prevalence of kind of ego defense systems, the changes between dominating defense mechanisms with change in age, and also to delve deeper into exploring the implications of these changes and their relevance in various fields of psychology and management.