The cultural construction of defense mechanisms has been a central concern of psychoanalytic and psychological anthropologists. Billig (1998) offers a novel perspective orn this issue. The approach advanced in this article goes beyond Billig's discursive view by taking seriously the determinative influence of preoedipal phase and preverbal communication for the establishment and maintenance of repression or psychological defense and by locating psychoanalysis within the wider field of social and biological sciences. The Euro-American middle-class bias prevalent in psychoanalysis and psychology overemphasizes verbal interactive and socialization strategies. This article suggests that an understanding of defense mechanisms in a cultural context can be furthered by ethnographic descriptions of the social and interpersonal environments of infants and young children prior to, during and after the emergence of language.
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