When External Problems Become Emotional Projects

Field Notes · by Kristen Tolbert

One thing I have noticed over decades of working with people is that they rarely become consumed by an external issue because of the issue alone. The issue becomes a psychological container.

Politics, professional titles, the economy, other people's behavior, the next generation, corporate decisions — none of these are trivial. But sometimes one of them begins carrying far more emotional weight than the facts alone can explain. At that point the conversation has quietly stopped being about the issue. It has become about managing an internal experience through an external object.

Psychoanalysis has a plain name for this move: displacement — the redirection of feeling from the place it actually lives onto a substitute that is safer, or simply more available, to be angry or frightened about (A. Freud, 1936). It is not a fringe idea. When researchers gathered decades of experiments together, they found that displaced affect — frustration or aggression aimed at a target that did not cause it — is a robust, measurable phenomenon, not a theoretical curiosity (Marcus-Newhall, Pedersen, Carlson, & Miller, 2000). The substitute object is real. The intensity attached to it is emotional.

This is also why facts rarely resolve the argument. If the concern were really an information problem, better information would settle it. But when the driver underneath is anxiety, information is beside the point — the mind is reasoning toward the conclusion that manages the feeling, not toward the one the evidence supports (Kunda, 1990). And so removing one concern simply creates another. This is the most telling sign. In the clinical literature on chronic worry, the striking feature is exactly this substitutability: the content changes while the core anxiety remains, because the worry is functioning as a way to stay busy at the surface and away from something more distressing underneath (Borkovec, Alcaine, & Behar, 2004). The external preoccupation is, in part, a way of not having the internal experience (Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson, 1999).

The organizing principle, in other words, is not the topic. It is the anxiety.

This connects directly to something about psychotherapy. A clinician can inadvertently spend years discussing content — difficult coworkers, aging parents, politics, the licensing board, the economy, the state of the world. The content changes from session to session and from year to year. The psychological process underneath often does not. This is one of the oldest observations in the field: that the same configuration tends to repeat itself, attaching to one object and then the next, long after the original antagonist is gone (Freud, 1920).

The work, then, is usually not to decide whether the external concern is valid. Often it is entirely valid. The work is to ask a different question: what function is this issue serving inside this person's psychological life? Because a defense is not a flaw to be argued away — it is doing a job, and it persists in proportion to the job it is doing (A. Freud, 1936). Anxiety that cannot find its real object will reliably find a substitute one (Freud, 1926).

That is a much more interesting question than whether the person is right about the economy. And it is usually the only one that goes anywhere.

References

Borkovec, T. D., Alcaine, O., & Behar, E. (2004). Avoidance theory of worry and generalized anxiety disorder. In R. G. Heimberg, C. L. Turk, & D. S. Mennin (Eds.), Generalized anxiety disorder: Advances in research and practice (pp. 77–108). Guilford Press.

Freud, A. (1936). The ego and the mechanisms of defence. Hogarth Press.

Freud, S. (1920). Beyond the pleasure principle (Standard Edition, Vol. 18). Hogarth Press.

Freud, S. (1926). Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety (Standard Edition, Vol. 20). Hogarth Press.

Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K. D., & Wilson, K. G. (1999). Acceptance and commitment therapy: An experiential approach to behavior change. Guilford Press.

Kunda, Z. (1990). The case for motivated reasoning. Psychological Bulletin, 108(3), 480–498.

Marcus-Newhall, A., Pedersen, W. C., Carlson, M., & Miller, N. (2000). Displaced aggression is alive and well: A meta-analytic review. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(4), 670–689.