INTELLECTUALIZATION AND ITS LOOKALIKES

Kyle Arnold

The present paper offers a conceptual review and clariication of the

theoretical construct of intellectualization, a popular concept both in
the psychoanalytic literature and in the culture at large. It is shown
that in the contemporary literature, intellectualization is inconsistent-
ly conceptualized. A review of the history of the concept reveals two
distinct threads of meaning, which are developed and clariied. Intel-
lectualization can best refer either to a variant of the more basic de-
fense of isolation of affect, or to the psychological translation of emo-
tional issues into intellectual terms. Several clinical misunderstandings
of intellectualization are presented in a cautionary light.

Patients use their intellects in a variety of defensive ways. Begin-

ning a psychotherapy session, an unemployed male patient re-
ported that he had spent a fruitful day at the library. He spent
most of the session recounting what he had read about ancient
history and mythology, including Caeser’s Gallic campaign, the
Pompeii volcanic eruption, and the ancient mystery cults of
Mithras. When I asked him questions about the concrete details
of his life, he responded with a few generalizations and then re-
turned to his lively review of the readings of the day.
Another patient, a creative young woman diagnosed with
schizophrenia, spent a session passionately expounding on sever-
al new inventions she had designed. One of these was a means of
impregnating men. Though a complex surgical procedure, this
patient told me, a sperm and egg could be implanted inside a
man’s colon, and his anus could then be sewn up. Although the
patient admitted that she had a few kinks to work out, she felt that
this procedure would allow a male to eventually give birth to a
child through the anus.
A third patient, an ex-convict in a therapy group for recover-
ing addicts, rebuffed my attempts to encourage the group to talk
Psychoanalytic Review, 101(5), October 2014 © 2014 N.P.A.P.
616 KYLE ARNOLD

about feelings by challenging me intellectually. When another

group participant mentioned a psychotropic medication he was
taking, this patient asked me if I knew what that medication was.
When I gave a somewhat simplistic answer, he described the pur-
pose of the medication in detail and asked me if I had ever been
to school. He then proceeded to lecture me theoretically on the
process of recovering from addiction.
I begin with these bits of clinical material because I believe
they point to a common diagnostic dilemma faced by psychother-
apists. Speciically, how are we to conceptualize what these pa-
tients were doing? Some would contend that they were engaged
in the defense mechanism of intellectualization. From their per-
spective, these patients were avoiding uncomfortable personal
material by leeing into a realm of disconnected abstraction.
Reading my clinical vignettes, these clinicians might contend that
I should have confronted these patients’ intellectual avoidance of
discomfort or, perhaps, made a more concerted effort to direct
their attention to their feelings.
It can be argued, however, that to consider the preceding
material “intellectualization” may be diagnostically erroneous
and clinically risky. As intellectualization was classically conceived
(Schafer, 1954), it had a precise meaning in relation to psychic
structure and defensive process. It referred to a speciic use of the
intellect in the service of the more basic defense mechanism of
isolation of affect. In subsequent contributions (such as Cramer,
2000; Kernberg, 1967; McWilliams, 1994; Perry & Cooper, 1989;
Valliant, 1977), the diagnostic implications of intellectualization
were expanded. Theorists linked intellectualization to neurotic
levels of ego functioning, in contrast to the more primitive de-
fenses associated with borderline and psychotic conditions.
Outside of the psychoanalytic literature proper, the construct
of intellectualization is a well-known defense in general. Introduc-
tory psychology textbooks, although notoriously spare and mis-
leading in their discussions of psychoanalysis (Habarth, Hansell,
& Grove, 2011) often include some review of the concept of de-
fense mechanisms and of intellectualization in particular. Indeed,
the concept is popular: A Google Internet search receives 191,000
hits for the term “intellectualization,” and 254,000 for the term
INTELLECTUALIZATION AND ITS LOOKALIKES 617

“intellectualize.” Altavista searches receive 281,000 hits for “intel-

lectualization” and 262,000 for “intellectualize,” respectively.
In the present paper, I propose that the concept of intel-
lectualization is overused by today’s psychotherapists. Many clini-
cians now refer to nearly any extensive use of the intellect as “intel-
lectualization.” Some clinical phenomena that can be incorrectly
encompassed by a loose use of the concept of intellectualization
include the following: projective identiications that make use of
the intellect, schizoid withdrawal into a cut-off internal world, and
intellectual devaluation, as well as other defensive operations.
The clinician who uses the construct of intellectualization impre-
cisely is at risk of treating all these various processes as if they were
intellectualizations. They are not, and to treat them as such may
iatrogenically increase resistances if the therapist attributes de-
fenses to the patient inaccurately.
Furthermore, the intellectual activity of clinicians and thera-
pists is sometimes criticized as “intellectualization.” Donnel Stern
(2002) has argued that in the ield today, the sophisticated use of
the intellect is widely felt to be politically incorrect. Jurist (2005)
has contended that we often fail to distinguish between intellectu-
alization and intellectuality, pointing out that it is possible to be
passionate about ideas. It appears that therapists’ intense disap-
proval of intellectual defensiveness has placed us at risk of slip-
ping into a kind of Philistine anti-intellectualism.
To provide support for my claim that the concept of intellec-
tualization is currently overused, I begin my discussion by criti-
cally examining some recent appearances of the term in psycho-
analytic literature. I then review the construct of intellectualization
as it was originated and elaborated by clinical theorists, reviewing
two separate strands of intellectualization theory in the history of
psychoanalysis. I describe several varieties of clinical phenomena
that may be mistaken for intellectualization.

“INTELLECTUALIZATION” IN RECENT
PSYCHOANALYTIC LITERATURE

Psychoanalytic authors use the term intellectualization in many dif-

ferent ways in contemporary literature, indicating that the term
618 KYLE ARNOLD

currently has a wide variety of meanings in the ield. For example,

in a paper on the role of affect in psychotherapy technique, Ma-
roda (2002) claims that therapists cannot effectively work with
primitive affective experiences through “interpretation or some
other type of intellectualization” (p. 115). She suggests that rath-
er than relying on intellectualization as a technique, therapists
ought to rely more on affective communications, such as nonver-
bal emotional reactions. For Maroda, the interpretation of primi-
tive emotional experience is inherently an intellectualization.
What Maroda seems to mean by intellectualization is a phony re-
sponse to affect that is predominantly intellectual.
Contrast Maroda’s reference to intellectualization to that of
Stern (2002). For Stern, intellectualization refers to a use of the
intellect in which thought is stripped of its affective colorations.
Stern (2002) contends that thoughts that are signiicant are illed
with emotion, and that these thoughts are actually dependent on
their emotional content. In intellectualization, by contrast, thought
is drained of affective content. From his perspective, even the
most abstract thoughts (including psychoanalytic interpretations)
do not count as intellectualization so long as they are intertwined
with affect. In this respect, Stern’s formulation is closer to classi-
cal conceptions such as Schafer’s (1954) than Maroda’s (2002).
Crastnopol (2001) uses the notion of intellectualization in a
paper examining the personalities of Guntrip and Fairbairn. She
reports that both Guntrip and Fairbairn were “intellectualized,”
which seems to be a description of their character. Discussing
Guntrip’s unsatisfying analysis with Fairbairn, Crastnopol states
that the character of both men contributed to the fact that they
spent much time arguing “in a . . . highly intellectualized fashion”
(p. 122). Crastnopol evidently means something very different
than Stern by “intellectualization,” as the very idea that one could
have a passionate argument while intellectualizing directly con-
tradicts Stern’s view that thought can only be considered intellec-
tualization when it is stripped of passion.
Bulitt and Farber (2002), deine intellectualization as a de-
fense in which “individuals unconsciously avoid information by
heightening intellectual processes” (p. 41). They give an example
of a man whose girlfriend asks him if he loves her. He replies by
INTELLECTUALIZATION AND ITS LOOKALIKES 619

asking what love is, and then referring to the multitude of diction-
ary deinitions of the term. These authors do not specify what in-
formation the individual is avoiding in their example, but pre-
sumably he is avoiding knowing whether he loves his girlfriend or
not, and perhaps the potential implications of that knowledge for
their relationship. Bulitt and Farber’s (2002) deinition of intel-
lectualization might it with Maroda’s use of the term, if we com-
pare the individual in their example to the therapist who responds
to another’s immediate affective experience in an inauthentic
and intellectual way.
Jacobs (1999, p. 171) briely mentions intellectualization
while discussing the disadvantages of asking patients the standard
question “What comes to mind?” He contends that this question
often leads to answers that are detached from affect and “lack life
and authenticity” because they are intellectualized. For Jacobs, in-
tellectualizations include speculative thoughts that are phony,
emotionally detached, and lifeless. There is an underlying habit
of thought in remarks like Jacobs’s (1999) that treats the charac-
teristics of detachment, inauthenticity, lifelessness, and unemo-
tional thinking as if they were all of a piece, all part of the same
defensive package. Jacobs’s remarks seem mostly compatible with
those of Stern (2002) and Bulitt and Farber (2002), but don’t jibe
with Crastnopol’s (2001) view, and rely on a much more exclusive
concept of intellectualization than that of Maroda (2002).

Research Findings on Intellectualization

Research on defense mechanisms has included the study of
intellectualization in examinations of the relationship of the level
of maturity of defenses to other clinical variables. Immature de-
fenses have been found to correlate to high psychiatric symptoms
scores on the Global Severity Index (Hibbard & Porcerelli, 1998;
Perry & Hoglend, 1998). Quantitative research has also found
that the immaturity of defenses is a predictor of poor global and
social functioning (Cramer, Blatt, & Ford, 1988; Perry & Cooper,
1992; Vaillant & Vaillant, 1992). Research indings are consistent
with the theoretical association of immature defenses with more
severe psychiatric diagnoses (Cramer, 2000). Children who have
620 KYLE ARNOLD

been neglected or abused evince more reliance on immature de-

fenses, while children who were not abused or neglected show
more use of intellectualization and other mature defenses (Finzi,
Har-Even, & Weizman, 2003).
A major limitation of the existing research, however, is that
none of it empirically examines intellectualization as a speciic
construct, but instead lumps intellectualization together with oth-
er relatively mature defenses. In short, in the research literature
as in the clinical and theoretical literature, intellectualization is
largely taken for granted rather than problematized.

A False Assumption of Shared Understanding

The list could go on. A search on the Psychoanalytic Elec-
tronic Publishing database reveals 225 uses of the word “intellec-
tualization” in psychoanalytic papers in the last twelve years. In
the vast majority of these papers, there is not enough context for
the reader to determine what the authors mean by the term “in-
tellectualization.” The authors of these papers seem to take for
granted that their readers implicitly understand how they are us-
ing the term. They unconsciously assume that their readership
shares with them a consensual understanding of intellectualiza-
tion, yet in the minority of papers in which the meaning of the
word was evident, there is little consensus on what the defense
mechanism of intellectualization actually entails. To be sure, ev-
erybody agrees that intellectualization has something to do with
the intellect, but they do not agree on much else. When the his-
tory of the construct of intellectualization in the older literature is
reviewed, two somewhat conlicting strands of theorizing emerge.

INTELLECTUALIZATION IN THE HISTORY

OF PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY

Freud
A common starting point when dealing with the history of
the concept of defenses is Freud’s conception of defenses in his
1926 text Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety. There, Freud describes
what is often considered to be the prototypical defensive process,
INTELLECTUALIZATION AND ITS LOOKALIKES 621

which, he argues, unfolds in several stages. First, a forbidden

sexual or aggressive impulse is awakened in the id. The ego un-
consciously anticipates dangerous consequences of that impulse,
such as loss of love, abandonment, castration, or moral reproach.
The anticipation of danger produces so-called signal anxiety, a
twinge of discomfort that alerts the ego to the incipient threat. To
eliminate that discomfort, the ego attempts to jettison the danger-
ous impulse and its derivatives from consciousness. The ego’s
strategy in doing so is what Freud called defense.
Although Freud does not discuss intellectualization as such
and never actually used the term, he does address the related de-
fense of isolation of affect during discussions of obsessional symp-
toms. When the obsessional is faced with an uncomfortable expe-
rience, Freud (1926) maintains, “The experience is not forgotten,
but, instead, it is deprived of its affect, and its associative connec-
tions are suppressed or interrupted so that it remains as though
isolated and is not reproduced in the ordinary processes of
thought” (p. 120). Freud links such “isolation” with the normal
phenomenon of intense concentration of thought in which dis-
tractions are excluded from attention. Part of any obsessional
symptom, Freud is saying, is an effort to exclude unpleasant urges
from full awareness by removing their affective charge. The result
is the deadpan, emotionless presentation of the obsessional neu-
rotic.

The Holden Caulield Deinition: Intellectualization as Translation

Into Consciousness
In J. D. Salinger’s famous book The Catcher in the Rye, its ado-
lescent protagonist, Holden Caulield, has an idealistic vision of
children in a rye ield in danger of falling off of a cliff into the
evils of adulthood, and of himself as a protector who must catch
them before they fall. A common reading of Holden’s idealistic
vision is that the child in danger of falling off the cliff is in fact
Holden himself, and that the fantasy represents Holden’s uncon-
scious conlicts about growing up.
Similarly, for Anna Freud (1936) the decisive feature of intel-
lectualization is that it is a process in which a patient masters un-
622 KYLE ARNOLD

conscious conlictual material by translating it into abstract ideas

that are within the sphere of conscious control—in Holden’s case,
the idea of the catcher in the rye. Anna Freud describes intellec-
tualization as a process in which the ego attempts to gain control
of the instinctual drives using thought. To protect itself from
overwhelming impulses, the ego “translates” these impulses into
abstract ideas (p. 162). For instance, an adolescent’s feelings
about relationships may be intellectualized as philosophical ideals
about friendship and loyalty (p. 162). An important feature dis-
tinguishing intellectualization from ordinary thought is that intel-
lectualization is not an attempt to solve external problems but an
effort to master internal drives. Consequently, intellectualized
thinking is often strikingly impractical and unrealistic. This pro-
cess of translation consists in a “connecting” (p. 163) of uncon-
scious impulses to thoughts that can be addressed in the con-
scious mind. It is the process of translation that is most central in
Anna Freud’s conception, not the place of affect. When authors
talk of material being “intellectualized,” they often mean some-
thing along the same lines that Anna Freud did. In their famous
dictionary of psychoanalysis, Laplanche and Pontalis (1973) de-
ine intellectualization similarly to Anna Freud as a “process
whereby the subject, in order to master his conlicts and emo-
tions, attempts to couch them in a discursive form” (p. 225). They
cite, for example, a patient who has a dificult decision to make
about a romantic relationship, but instead expounds philosophi-
cally about the virtues of free love versus marriage.
An intelligent female patient who was guilt ridden about her
sexual impulses had adopted an attitude of utter sellessness and
passivity as a way of dealing with these urges. This patient, a grad-
uate student, said that she wanted to pursue a career in scientiic
research. However, she said she did not think that she would be
capable of doing so because the standards of research she held
were so high. These standards were organized around the core
premise that research must be completely pure and lacking in any
bias and subjectivity. She understood, however, that the world is
inherently lawed and impure and, therefore, that her ideals
could never be fully realized. For her, the ideal of pure research
was a translation into consciousness of an unconscious fantasy of
INTELLECTUALIZATION AND ITS LOOKALIKES 623

moral purity in which she could be cleansed of the sexual urges

that plagued her. Pondering a career conducting impossibly pure
research was a means of dealing with her unconscious conlicts
about sex. She could achieve the purity in her ideals that she
could not achieve in reality.
Intellectualization-as-translation is strikingly evident in the
ield of the psychology of knowledge, the psychological study of
conceptual systems. For example, in a study of the psychobio-
graphical origins of the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, George
Atwood and I (Arnold & Atwood, 2000) argued that Nietzsche’s
oft-cited views about the “death of God” and the internal contra-
dictions of Christian morality comprised intellectual translations
of Nietzsche’s unconscious feelings about the death of his own
father, a minister, when Nietzsche was a young child. Some au-
thors have similarly argued that Freudian theory’s concept of the
Oedipus complex is an intellectual translation of Freud’s own
family experiences when he was a young child. Intellectualiza-
tions like these become evident whenever one studies the psycho-
logical meanings that a conceptual system holds for its author
(see Atwood & Stolorow, 1979).
It is questionable whether intellectualization in this sense can
accurately be considered to be a defense mechanism. As the phi-
losopher David Hume famously put it, “Reason is . . . the slave of
the passions . . .” (1740/1967, p. 295). The psychoanalytic princi-
ple of overdetermination demands that we assume that every
thought is partially a translation of unconscious material. Psycho-
analysis does not allow thoughts about cigars to just be thoughts
about cigars. Even the most concrete thought is the tip of an un-
conscious iceberg, laden with unconscious associations, memory
traces, sensations, and images. If so, Anna Freud’s proposal that
intellectualization functions to master internal impulses rather
than external problems rests on an untenable distinction between
thoughts that are exclusively about internal reality versus thoughts
that are exclusively about external reality. And if that is the case, it
starts to look like intellectualization in Anna Freud’s sense is just
another way of conceiving of thinking in general. But if every
thought is an Anna Freudian intellectualization, then it hardly
makes much sense to use the term for a form of defensive activity.
624 KYLE ARNOLD

The consequence of successfully analyzing this so-called defense

would be the elimination of all of a patient’s thought processes
and his or her transformation into an impulsive, thoughtless
brute.

The Mr. Spock Deinition: Intellectualization as Isolation of Affect

As I mentioned before, it is a commonly held view that intel-
lectualization is variation of the broader defense of isolation of
affect. A well-known stereotype of the person who relies heavily
on intellectualization in this sense of the term is Star Trek’s Mr.
Spock. Spock is an alien who characteristically makes choices
based exclusively on logical thought processes and does not per-
mit any affective experience to enter into his awareness. For Mr.
Spock, affect is simply not experienced at all and has no role in
his decisions or relationships. Whenever he is faced with expres-
sions of human feelings, he dismissively replies that these are “il-
logical.”
One statement of this view of intellectualization can be found
in Schafer (1954). He states that the purpose of intellectualiza-
tion, like isolation of affect, is to “seal off affect” (p. 51). What
makes intellectualization distinct from other defenses is that it
seals off affect by deemphasizing the internal and relational con-
licts associated with the affect and instead highlighting arcane
intellectual issues. For Schafer, as for Anna Freud, intellectualiza-
tions may translate unconscious concerns, but their main purpose
is to redirect attention away from affective experience onto
thought processes that are emotionally detached. In essence, at-
tention is redirected from emotionally charged internal stimuli
onto emotionally neutral internal stimuli (Kestenbaum, 1983).
Valliant (1971, 1993) offers a similar perspective. He (Val-
liant, 1993) states that in intellectualization, the patient controls
affects and impulses by putting them into thoughts rather than
consciously feeling them. For Valliant, any intellectualization nec-
essarily substitutes for affects and impulses. For example, a pa-
tient may abstractly explain his or her emotional conlicts, rather
than consciously experiencing them. Intellectualization also shields
the patient from affects and impulses insofar as it replaces emo-
INTELLECTUALIZATION AND ITS LOOKALIKES 625

tional experiences with emotionally neutral thoughts. For Schafer

and Valliant, intellectualization only occurs in the context of iso-
lation of affect: No isolation of affect, no intellectualization.

Two Distinct Deinitions

Although Holden Caulield and Mr. Spock both rely heavily
on intellect, their personalities are radically different. Holden
Caulield is not inhibited in his expression of feelings; in fact he is
quite the opposite. He is immersed in sentimental ideals about
human kindness and acts on these whenever he can. Holden may
at times use his intellect defensively to control his internal con-
licts and keep them out of his awareness, but he does not use his
intellect to isolate affect. Mr. Spock, by contrast, would never en-
dorse Holden’s ideals. Coldly logical, Mr. Spock would not allow
sentimentality like Holden’s to inlame him. One can easily imag-
ine an argument between Holden and Spock in which Holden
hotheadedly accuses Spock of lacking any human kindness and
Spock responds by calmly enumerating the disadvantages of such
traits in human beings. Holden Caulield’s version of intellectual-
ization and Mr. Spock’s version are not the same thing. Caulield’s
intellectualization is a traitlike disposition to couch emotional
conlicts in intellectual terms, whereas Mr. Spock’s intellectualiza-
tion is a defensive operation that prevents any emotionality from
intruding into his awareness.

Other Defensive Uses of the Intellect

Just what it is that patients whose defenses are incorrectly la-
beled as intellectualization do? The answer is broad: all sorts of
things. Patients can use their minds in the service of many kinds
of defensive operations. Schizoid withdrawal, narcissistic idealiza-
tion or devaluation, omnipotent control, undoing, masochistic
self-punishment, identiication with the aggressor—the list goes
on. All of these defenses, and many others, can be implemented
using the intellect. Let’s take, for example, a candidate at a psy-
chotherapy training program who feels threatened by an intimi-
dating instructor who happens to be a respected theoretician.
626 KYLE ARNOLD

The candidate deals with her anxiety by overidentifying with the

instructor: imitating the instructor’s manner of speaking and con-
verting to the instructor’s theoretical orientation, reading several
of the instructor’s papers and becoming an expert on his theo-
ries. The candidate angrily denounces all other orientations and
asserts that the instructor’s is far superior. What is the operative
defense in this example? It is not intellectualization, but identii-
cation with the aggressor. The candidate uses her intellect in the
service of identiication with the aggressor, to be sure. But the
important point is the defensive identiication. The intellect is
just a means to that end. Imagine further what it might be like to
be the therapist of a candidate with the preceding dynamic. If one
were to conceptualize the candidate’s defensiveness as a form of
intellectualization, one would miss the core dynamic that is oper-
ative. The therapist could be misled by that conceptualization
into drawing the candidate’s attention to a supposed avoidance of
affective experience, when the heart of the dynamic lies else-
where. Hearing the therapist incorrectly attribute to her an avoid-
ance of emotionality, the quite emotional candidate could be-
come more belligerent and defensive as a reaction to feeling
misunderstood. It is not dificult to imagine various impasses that
might result.
I examine a few other examples of the variety of defensive
uses of the intellect in the following section.

THE INTELLECT AND PRIMITIVE DEFENSES

Here, I want to describe in more detail several ways in which prim-

itive defenses can make use of the intellect without qualifying as
intellectualization proper.

Narcissistic Devaluation: The Intellect as a Weapon

Kernberg (1967) writes of narcissistic dynamics in which the
patient defends against intolerable envy by devaluing the object of
his or her envy. Devaluation comprises a kind of one-upmanship
in which the patient tries to handle envy by putting an admired
other down. With the envied object thus devalued, admiration is
INTELLECTUALIZATION AND ITS LOOKALIKES 627

no longer called for and envy is diminished. In some instances, the

intellect may be used as a weapon in the service of devaluation.
However, intellectual devaluation is not intellectualization. Intel-
lectual devaluation does not require any isolation of affect, but
rather, merely requires that the object be portrayed as inferior.
During a psychological assessment, a patient compared his
limited education with that of the examiner, a psychologist. He then
asked in detail about the process of test interpretation. He criti-
cized the examiner’s answers to his questions, attacking the reli-
ability of the tests administered and the underlying philosophical
assumptions of psychological assessment. He stated, furthermore,
that the examiner could not possibly have the intellectual back-
ground required to interpret the test results properly.
Because the patient uses his intellect and behaves defensive-
ly, some might take his behavior to be intellectualization. Howev-
er, the patient does not appear to isolate affect from thought, as
his contempt shows through quite clearly. Moreover, what is cen-
trally defensive about the patient’s behavior is not that he thinks
in abstract and intellectual terms. Rather, the defensiveness is
that he copes with his envy of the examiner by aggressively devalu-
ing him. Even if the devaluation did not make use of the intel-
lect—if, for instance, the patient had simply used a crude put-
down—it would remain a defensive maneuver. In addition, the
practical approaches suggested by the concept of intellectualiza-
tion are unlikely to be effective in this instance. To confront the
patient with the notion that he is avoiding his or her feelings by
focusing on abstract ideas would not only be incorrect but delete-
rious. Such a remark could be perceived by the patient as a retal-
iatory put-down and trigger more desperately defensive behavior.
A more effective approach might focus on the narcissistic dynam-
ic. If given adequate mirroring by a therapist sensitive to the pa-
tient’s narcissistic vulnerability, the patient might be more ame-
nable to completing the tests.

Projective Identiication: Being the Rational One

A therapy patient, “Steve,” who was a surgeon, often com-
plained about one of his residents, a much younger man who
628 KYLE ARNOLD

seemed to overdramatize problems and respond to them with

poor judgment. Steve complained that he had tried to remediate
this individual by reprimanding him and counseling him on the
appropriate procedures, but this approach had not achieved the
desired result. It was evident at the outset that his attempt at re-
mediation was somewhat generalized and defensive and seemed
not to be tailored to the details of the situation. Some might rush
to the conclusion that because Steve was using his intellectual un-
derstanding of procedures to respond defensively to interperson-
al conlict, the operative defense was intellectualization. It was
not.
After extensive inquiry, Steve revealed that he, himself, had a
history of being reprimanded by his own superiors for overreact-
ing to problems and making rash decisions that resulted in nega-
tive outcomes. Steve, a narcissistic man for whom appearance was
everything, experienced terrible shame when this aspect of his
personality was exposed to public view. After extensive work on
his narcissism, Steve was eventually able to see that the younger
doctor represented shame-ridden parts of Steve’s own personality
that he needed to evacuate. As Steve came to terms with his hot-
headed and dramatizing style, he further noticed that his ap-
proach to the resident, although intellectually consistent with
rules and policies, was unconsciously provocative. Steve had un-
consciously used a selective interpretation of institutional policies
as a weapon to provoke his resident. When Steve was successful in
his provocations, he was then able to use the resident’s indignant
reaction as further evidence of the resident’s bad judgment, while
comfortably experiencing himself as a rational and benign au-
thority.
As Steve’s self-empathy expanded and he withdrew his pro-
jections, his empathy for the younger doctor increased. Differen-
tiating more clearly between his projections and the resident’s
behavior, Steve began to appreciate the resident as a creative indi-
vidual whose unconventionality sometimes contributed to clashes
with authority but did not necessarily imply that he was unit to be
a doctor. Steve was able to relax his defenses and assume the role
of a calm and sensitive authority igure to the resident. Steve re-
ported that, perhaps because of his own change in attitude, the
INTELLECTUALIZATION AND ITS LOOKALIKES 629

resident came to rely increasingly on Steve’s guidance, resulting

in a successful completion of the resident’s training, which relect-
ed well on both parties.
If the therapist had responded to Steve’s projective dynamics
by attempting to show him that his reaction to the interpersonal
conlict was overly intellectual, I believe that the treatment would
have suffered. Although Steve used his intellect defensively, the
function of the defensive activity was not to avoid feeling, nor was
it to translate feelings into intellectual terms. Rather, the purpose
of the intellectual preoccupation with rules and procedures was
to position Steve as the digniied party in the interaction and
evacuate the shame-ridden parts of himself into the resident.

Schizoid Withdrawal: The Intellect as Refuge

McWilliams (2006) describes schizoid patients who take ref-
uge from an overwhelming reality by withdrawing into fantasy or
the intellectual realm. They may handle potential interpersonal
impingements and anxieties by avoiding engagement with the ex-
ternal world, instead elaborating a rich internal life. McWilliams
contends that such patients are often mistakenly believed to be
cold and unemotional because of their withdrawal from personal
relatedness. She argues that, in fact, schizoid patients internally
struggle with regulating overwhelming affect. Their internal emo-
tional struggles, however, are often invisible to others because of
their interpersonal detachment.
One psychotherapy patient seemed to lee into his intellect
whenever his therapist made an accurate interpretation. He re-
sponded to interpretations by blushing bashfully, then becoming
silent. When his therapist asked what was going through his mind,
he awkwardly offered a collection of disconnected free-associative
relections about the philosophical implications of her remarks,
gradually trailing off into mumbling. The therapist, assuming that
the patient was intellectualizing, then stated that the patient was
avoiding his feelings by escaping into thought. The patient looked
away and became quiet again. He had been shut down.
It may be observed that this kind of defensive use of the intel-
lect is particularly dificult to distinguish from intellectualization
630 KYLE ARNOLD

proper. After all, the patient clearly uses abstract thought in the
service of avoidance. Isn’t that the very deinition of intellectual-
ization? If we consider McWilliams’s (1994) views, though, a dif-
ferent perspective emerges. Although it is undeniable that the
patient handles discomfort by withdrawing into his intellect, it is
not at all clear that isolation of affect is operative. The patient
continues to experience emotional discomfort while communi-
cating his philosophical relections, defensive as these relections
may be. He is, to be sure, avoiding something. But what he avoids is
not affect as such, but the impinging reality of his relationship
with the therapist.

SUMMARY

To sum up, I have argued that in contemporary psychodynamic

literature, the defense of intellectualization is conceptualized in-
consistently. In the classical literature, intellectualization was un-
derstood in two fundamental ways: as the translation of emotional
material into intellectual terms, and as a variant of the more basic
defense of isolation of affect. As a rhetorical device, I call patients
who use the former version of intellectualization “Holden Caul-
ields,” contrasting them with “Mr. Spocks,” who use the latter de-
fense. I distinguish these two meanings of intellectualization from
other defensive uses of the intellect that can be conlated with
them, and suggest that therapists consider these differences when
working with patients who use the intellect defensively. In the
consulting room, incorrectly conceptualizing all defensive uses of
the intellect as intellectualizations can lead to misattunements
that may contribute to ruptures in the therapeutic relationship,
and poor outcomes.

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