Coping and Defense Mechanisms: A Scoping Review

The relationship between coping and defense mechanisms warrants attention. These constructs have historically been conflated and difficult to distinguish, and have gained renewed research interest in recent years. Defense mechanisms are commonly seen as temporally stable, unconscious, and related to personality functioning while coping mechanisms are often seen as flexible, conscious, and stressor dependent. We conducted a scoping review of the empirical literature on the relationship between coping and defense mechanisms. A total of 35 empirical studies were identified, consisting of 23 cross-sectional and 12 longitudinal studies in psychiatric, medical, and community samples. The cross-sectional studies reported consistent relationships between maladaptive coping and immature defense mechanisms, as well as between adaptive coping mechanisms and mature defense mechanisms. The temporality and stability of adaptive functioning have produced inconsistent results and require further research. Although studies suggest that defense mechanisms can improve with therapeutic intervention, change in the use of coping mechanisms in therapy is less clear. We suggest future hypotheses and highlight the importance of novel developments in observer-rated measures of assessment that may be applied longitudinally over time.