Intellectualisation

In psychology, intellectualization is a defense mechanism where reasoning is used to block confrontation with an unconscious conflict and its associated emotional stress – where thinking is used to avoid feeling. It involves removing one's self, emotionally, from a stressful event. Intellectualization may accompany, but is different from, rationalization, the pseudo-rational justification of irrational acts.

Intellectualization is one of Freud's original defense mechanisms. Freud believed that memories have both conscious and unconscious aspects, and that intellectualization allows for the conscious analysis of an event in a way that does not provoke anxiety.

Intellectualization is a transition to reason, where the person avoids uncomfortable emotions by focusing on facts and logic. The situation is treated as an interesting problem that engages the person on a rational basis, whilst the emotional aspects are completely ignored as being irrelevant.

While Freud did not himself use the term "intellectualization", in On Negation he described clinical instances in which "the intellectual function is separated from the affective process....The outcome of this is a kind of intellectual acceptance of the repressed, while at the same time what is essential to the repression persists". Elsewhere he described an (unsuccessful) analysis with "the patient participating actively with her intellect, though absolutely tranquil emotionally...completely indifferent", while he also noted how in the obsessional the thinking processes themselves becomes sexually charged.

Anna Freud devoted a chapter of her book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense [1937] to "Intellectualization at Puberty", seeing the growing intellectual and philosophical approach of that period as relatively normal attempts to master adolescent drives. She considered that only "if the process of intellectualization overruns the whole field of mental life" should it be considered pathological.

Jargon is often used as a device of intellectualization. By using complex terminology, the focus becomes on the words and finer definitions rather than the human effects.

Intellectualization protects against anxiety by repressing the emotions connected with an event. A comparison sometimes made is that between isolation (also known as 'isolation of affect') and intellectualization. The former is a dissociative response that allows one to dispassionately experience an unpleasant thought or event. The latter is a cognitive style that seeks to conceptualize an unpleasant thought or event in an intellectually comprehensible manner. [DSM-IV-TR, page 808, thus mentions them as separate entities]. It allows one to rationally deal with a situation, but may cause suppression of feelings that need to be acknowledged to move on.

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