Perhaps the greatest problem faced by the academic social sciences is that what is measurable is often irrelevant, and what is truly relevant often cannot be measured. Sigmund Freud's mechanisms of defense are an excellent example of the latter. In 1894, the year that Freud branched out into psychiatry, he was still a hard-nosed scientist-he was a practicing neurologist and the secretary of the Society of German Naturalists and Physicians. Yet, that very year, he was hard at work describing defense mechanisms for the first time (1). Freud observed not only that affect could be "dislocated or transposed" from ideas (by the unconscious mechanisms that he would later call dissociation, repression, and isolation), but also that affect could be "reattached" to other ideas (by the mechanism of displacement). Freud also noted that subject and object could be cognitively reversed by the process he called projection.
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