When a human experiences “mental pain”, they can adopt a “defence” to avoid this pain. This can lead to “damaging consequences” and set up a vicious circle.
(David Malan, 1979: Individual Therapy and the Science of Psychodynamics: Paraphrase of points 1 and 7 on page 15).
A Defence as a Vicious Cycle
I reframe Malan’s defences in systems theory terms as an amplifying feedback cycle, a vicious cycle linking dread (mental pain), defence, and damage:
In this amplifying feedback cycle:
- A stronger dread tends to
- Increase the use of a defence against the dread, which tends to
- Increase the damage it causes, which tends to
- Strengthen the dread, and the cycle repeats.
These defensive activities are perverse because the damage they cause increases the activity rather than decreasing it. This means that the defences are self-defeating because they increase the threat of the dread.
By viewing compulsions as amplifying feedback cycles, clinicians can offer clients an empowering, non-judgmental way to understand their behaviour. For individuals considering their own lives, this framework encourages them to identify how their solution to a problem could be escalating that problem.
The Case Study: Client Zed
To see how I used this framework in my counselling, consider an example counselling session.
In the counselling session with Client Zed, an invented problem gambling client, I wrote keywords that he used on a whiteboard under three headings: (1) What he liked about gambling, (2) What he disliked, and (3) Other issues in his life. I saw a cycle linking what he had said:
I presented this cycle to him on the whiteboard, saying, “There seems to be a cycle at work here: (1) The more you gamble to feel respected during your winning streaks, (2) the more money you lose and the less respect you receive at home and work. (3) This increases your need for respect, which (4) throws you back into gambling to feel respected. This vicious cycle could be driving your gambling.” For Client Zed, seeing the vicious cycle was a revelation. He saw that his efforts to gain respect actually lost him respect. The example counselling session page details this session.
Malan’s Psychodynamics
The book “Individual Therapy and the Science of Psychodynamics” (Malan, 1979, p.15) identifies central aspects of psychodynamic therapy:
- People’s consciousness of their defence mechanisms ranges from nearly fully conscious to totally unconscious. (Malan, p.15)
- People use defence mechanisms to avoid what they dread. (Weinberg, 1995, uses the term dread.) There are three parts to these mechanisms:
- A hidden feeling, unacceptable impulse, mental pain, or mental conflict. (Dread)
- Anxiety: The feared consequences of expressing the hidden feelings.
- Defence: the way a person avoids their dread.
- The therapist analyses the client’s situation, identifies the client’s defence mechanism, and presents this analysis to the client via interpretations.
- One form of interpretation links two of the three parts of a defence mechanism: dread, anxiety, and defence. (Malan, p.80)
- Therapy aims to connect the patient with “as much of his true feelings as he can bear” (Malan, p.74).
Note: You can read about psychoanalyst David Huntingford Malan on Wikipedia.
Gambling as a Defence
Here are some ways in which a defence, like Zed’s gambling, can shield a person from underlying dread.
A defence as an illusory solution to a dread
The defence can offer an illusory way to overcome dread. For Zed, when he was on a winning streak, he felt respected. He was so convinced of this that he had his symbols for gambling and respect engraved on his belt, and his face lit up with excitement when he talked about gambling.
A defence as a distraction from dread
The defence can also distract from dread by fully capturing a person’s attention. For Zed, his gambling captured his full attention while he:
- Gambled, e.g., analysing the odds, selecting winners, and barracking for his horse as it raced, and
- Dealt with gambling crises, e.g., coping with having no money, trying to repay debts, and planning to fund his next bet.
Recruiting classic defences
Gambling can act as a defence by recruiting classic psychodynamic defences, including:
- Denial: Refusing to accept reality, e.g., denying the damage caused by gambling to their financial situation and their relationships.
- Fantasy: Retreating into far-fetched scenarios to escape reality, e.g., Zed’s conviction that he gained respect through his gambling.
- Repression: The exclusion of distressing thoughts, feelings or conflicts from conscious awareness,
- Passive aggression: Indirect expression of hostility, e.g. a gambler losing food money to express anger towards a partner.
- Acting out: Expressing feelings through impulsive actions instead of words.
- Avoidance: Avoiding people, places, or situations linked to uncomfortable thoughts or feelings, e.g., avoiding home problems by taking time out at a gambling venue.
Some clients with gambling problems also become involved with alcohol, drugs, or criminal activity. Like gambling, these behaviours can also serve as defences against dread.
Intermittency & the Rate of Escalation
Defensive cycles escalate intermittently, not continuously. Clearly, gambling is intermittent due to:
- Natural delays: People cannot gamble continuously; they gamble when they have the impulse, time, and money, with life frequently delaying gambling, e.g., family involvement, work, sleep, and attempts to quit.
- Pulses of damage: A single episode of a defensive activity can lead to multiple pulses of damage. For example, a gambler might lose money, causing: (1) immediate stress, (2) a missed rent payment three days later, and (3) a marital confrontation when their partner sees a rental notice two weeks later. Each defensive activity can trigger multiple episodes of damage, sending pulses of activity around the cycle, escalating each element of the cycle.
- Resource exhaustion: An unconstrained vicious cycle pauses as soon as it exhausts a necessary resource. A person must pause their gambling when they run out of money, or steal and end up in gaol. This happens in all unconstrained feedback cycles; for example, global-warming vicious cycles that melt ice must pause when all the ice has melted and can resume after more ice forms; see my page on the Arctic ice-albedo cycle.
The Intermittency slows the rate of amplification.
Lust and dread
Client Zed seemed wounded and faced so many difficulties. It occurred to me that he longed for others to respect him, and that his way of grasping for respect got him into trouble. I think of it as a compulsive need or lust for respect, just as others can lust after power, wealth, or sex: a strong drive that can have damaging consequences. I also think of his lust as his mental pain of needing respect, a dread.
My intervention linked defence and dread.
A psychodynamic intervention can link two of the three elements of Malan’s triangle of conflict, which consists of (1) hidden feelings (dread), (2) defence, and (3) anxiety, where anxiety is the “feared consequences of expressing these hidden feelings”. (Malan, p. 15, p. 18).
I have never thought of my counselling as psychodynamic therapy. Nevertheless, my cyclic intervention had one feature of a psychodynamic intervention; it linked Zed’s defence (his gambling) and his dread (his conscious mental pain of needing respect). It linked these in a way that was a revelation for the client.
Zed’s consciousness of his defence
People’s consciousness of a defence mechanism can range from nearly fully conscious to totally unconscious (Malan, p. 15).
Zed’s belt design showed he was fully conscious of (1) his gambling, (2) his desire for respect and (3) his conviction that gambling won him respect. He was not conscious of other aspects of his gambling. He seemed to overlook how his gambling lost him respect at home and at work. Also, he found it a revelation that his gambling established a vicious cycle that escalated his gambling.
Anxiety
Consider how anxiety fits into this understanding of human behaviour based on feedback.
In David Malan’s psychodynamic framework, anxiety is the feared consequence of experiencing or expressing an intolerable hidden feeling. Also, anxiety is central to key tasks for the psychotherapist: to understand the patient’s (1) defences, (2) anxiety, and (3) hidden feelings [dread], and to reveal this to the patient through interpretations. (Malan, p. 15)
This understanding of anxiety complements the American Psychological Association’s definition: anxiety is “an emotion characterised by feelings of tension, worried thoughts, and physical changes… typically accompanied by a feeling of dread or apprehension regarding a future event or an uncertain outcome.” (APA Dictionary of Psychology)
When a vicious cycle linking dread (hidden feelings), defensive behaviour, and damage dominates a person’s life, this mysterious dynamic increasingly controls their life. They have limited awareness of: (1) the vicious cycle escalating their destructive, compulsive habit, (2) their underlying driving dread, and (3) how their behaviour defends them from this dread. The cycle pushes them into disturbing situations, such as the gambler considering crime, so they experience tension, worry, apprehension: anxiety. The vicious cycle generates anxiety.
Classic defences as vicious cycles
Standard psychodynamic defences can become vicious cycles. Here are two examples.
Denial
The classic psychodynamic defence of denial can form a vicious cycle.
See the denial and addiction page.
Projection
The defence of projection can also generate a vicious self-reinforcing cycle. Projection occurs when a person experiences an impulse, feeling, or trait that they find unacceptable, disowns it, and attributes it to someone else. Consider the hypothetical example of Peter, who projects his hostility towards others.
Peter dreads his own feelings of hostility toward others. For him, hostility is wrong, dangerous, and unacceptable. This can generate an amplifying feedback cycle in which:
- An increase in his dread tends to
- Increase his projection of hostility onto others. That is, he cannot tolerate his own hostile feelings and sees other people’s behaviour as hostility toward him. He becomes more hypervigilant, suspicious, and emotionally guarded, watching for any sign of hostility. He anticipates hostility and withdraws to protect himself. This tends to
- Increase the damage to his relationships with others. People experience his guardedness, distance, and suspicion as unwarranted, as a rejection of them, or as frightening. They respond with coolness, withdrawal, or annoyance. He interprets their reactions as unprovoked hostility directed at him, which, for him, confirms the terrible nature of hostility and his rejection of it. This confirmation tends to
- Deepen the dread of his own hostility, and the cycle repeats.
Over time, the defence that initially kept Peter from understanding his own hostility increases both his hostility and others’ hostility towards him.
Wind up
Working as a problem gambling counsellor, I drew on a range of methods, including motivational interviewing and psychodrama. As described in the example counselling session with Client Zed, I found it clinically useful to help clients recognise that their gambling was a misguided attempt to solve a problem that, perversely, intensified it, rather than a sign of personal failure or madness. I reframed their problem as an amplifying feedback cycle, or, in plain language, as a vicious cycle.
Initially, I recognised cycles in my clients’ lives and later realised they aligned with systems theory. Then I saw David Malan’s observation that the damaging consequences of a defence can set up a “vicious circle” and saw how classic psychodynamic defences could form similar loops. This further supported my cyclic interventions. Despite my limited understanding of psychodynamic therapy, I continue theorising.
Understanding psychodynamic defences through a systems lens could offer therapeutic benefits for both counsellors and clients:
- Destigmatising: It reframes destructive behaviours (addictions, projections, denials) as misguided attempts to soothe emotional pain, rather than mental dysfunction and personal failure like madness or lack of willpower.
- Building Rapport: Clients often reacted with relief at this framing of their gambling problems and engaged with the counselling process.
- Convincing cognitive interventions: Co-creating a whiteboard summary of the client’s story, identifying a vicious cycle within it, and presenting it as a clear cycle diagram validated the client’s distress and often produced a cognitive shift. A cyclic intervention can become a convincing cognitive intervention.
- Rogerian Therapy: These collaborative, non-judgmental interventions support counselling consistent with Rogerian principles.
- Narrative therapy: These cyclic interventions can have an impact close to Narrative Therapy’s “externalisation”, allowing the client and counsellor to treat the cycle as a dynamic happening to the client rather than the client being the problem.
- A Universal Framework: Systems Theory feedback cycles could provide a unifying structure for understanding many human difficulties, including psychodynamic defences, compulsions, and addictions.
- A Bridge Between Modalities: It offers a clear, practical conceptual bridge connecting psychodynamic depth psychology and practical, short-term counselling.
Identifying a damaging vicious cycle sets the goal of disrupting it. This work should not be only problem-focused, but also solution-focused, reframing moves against the vicious cycle as virtuous cycles of recovery.
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Loaded 6 Dec 2025; Updated 20 Oct 2026.