“Forget About It”: How Ghosts in the Nursery Reveals the Defence Mechanism of Denial
Exploring Anna Freud's theory of defence mechanisms and the intergenerational transmission of trauma.
When Anna Freud sat down to systematise her father's scattered observations about how the mind protects itself, she gave psychology one of its most enduring maps: the defence mechanisms.
Published in 1936, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence named and organised the ego's unconscious strategies for managing anxiety: repression, projection, reaction formation, and, among the most familiar of all, denial (A. Freud, 1966).
Nearly forty years later, Selma Fraiberg, Edna Adelson and Vivian Shapiro's classic paper Ghosts in the Nursery (1975) gave denial a human face — or rather, several human faces, belonging to mothers who could not let themselves see what their own childhoods had done to them.
Reading the two cases alongside Anna Freud's theory shows just how much explanatory power that single defence mechanism carries.
“Denial doesn't erase the facts; it blocks the individual's willingness or ability to acknowledge what those facts mean.”
A central idea explored throughout this article
What Denial Actually Does
In Anna Freud's framework, denial is one of the ego's ways of managing an external reality too threatening to admit into conscious awareness. This is distinct from repression, which deals with internal impulses (Kelland, 2017).
Denial doesn't erase the facts; it blocks the individual's willingness or ability to acknowledge what those facts mean. A more contemporary summary puts it plainly: denial is “the refusal to accept reality, allowing the person to avoid confronting uncomfortable truths” (Kumari, 2024, p. 4).
It can be adaptive in small, temporary doses, but when it hardens into a permanent stance, it can quietly reshape an entire family's relationship to its own history.
That's exactly what Fraiberg and her colleagues found when they explored why some parents, but not others, repeat the pain of their own childhoods with their babies.
Denial in the March Family: “Forget About It”
Mrs. March's family had a motto for handling loss, betrayal and grief: forget about it. When her mother disappeared into psychiatric hospitalisation, when Aunt Jane's son was killed in the war, and when her own father died, the family response was uniform silence.
Mrs. March herself could recite this history factually, but for years she could not access any of the pain attached to it. She had, in effect, denied not the events of her childhood but their emotional reality, closing the door on her own suffering as completely as she later closed the door, metaphorically, on her infant daughter Mary's cries.
When the Past Remains Unspoken
This same denial appeared more literally around the question of incest in Mrs. March's past. When her grandmother accused her of “seducing” her own grandfather after he had exposed himself to her as a child, Mrs. March denied the accusation outright.
This response can be understood in the context of an unbearable experience that no child should have to navigate alone. It took nearly two years of treatment before Mrs. March could allow this secret, and the shame buried with it, into conscious memory.
Denial in the Beyer Family: “There Was Nothing Wrong”
Annie Beyer's denial showed up differently, but no less powerfully. When the clinical team first arrived, sixteen-year-old Annie's opening position was flat refusal: there was nothing wrong with her or her baby, and any suggestion otherwise was part of a conspiracy against her.
This is denial functioning as Anna Freud described it: not necessarily a conscious lie, but a genuine refusal to admit an unbearable reality — in this case, the seriousness of her difficulties in caring for her son.
Understanding the past can be an important part of recognising patterns in present relationships.
Denial also touched Annie's understanding of her own childhood abuse. She could describe the beatings from her stepfather in chilling, exact detail. Fraiberg and colleagues emphasise in their concluding hypothesis that what she had not processed was the terror attached to those memories.
The facts were admitted; the affect was denied. This is a subtler cousin of classic denial, closely related to what Anna Freud classified as isolation of affect. It is precisely this split between memory and feeling that the authors explore as a possible mechanism through which trauma can be repeated across generations.
Why the Denial Had to Break Before the Baby Could Be Safe
The therapeutic breakthroughs in both cases came at the moment denial gave way. Mrs. March's turning point arrived only once she allowed herself to remember the “unspeakable” and, crucially, to feel it.
Annie's arrived when she recognised her own frightening voice as her mother's, rather than denying the resemblance.
In both cases, Fraiberg's team found that as long as denial — of the past, of its pain, or of its resemblance to the present — stayed in place, the ghosts kept their residence in the nursery.
Only when the mothers could say, in effect, “yes, this happened, and yes, it hurt,” could they begin to recognise and change the patterns affecting their relationships with their children.
Denial can be protective in the short term, but when it becomes rigid, it may prevent the self-awareness needed for meaningful change.
This aligns with a broader observation in the defence-mechanism literature: while denial can be protective in the short term, its excessive or rigid use is linked to poorer psychological outcomes and can prevent the self-awareness that healthier coping requires (Kumari, 2024).
Fraiberg's cases are a vivid clinical illustration of this principle, showing how a parent's unresolved emotional experiences may influence the next generation.
A Living Legacy
It is worth noting that Ghosts in the Nursery is not the only place this metaphor has resurfaced in the literature on psychotherapy's history.
Writing in Psychology Today, psychiatrist Frank Ninivaggi traces a related theme he calls “amnesia”, a broad category that includes denial, running through nearly every school of psychotherapy since Freud, from psychoanalysis to modern cognitive approaches (Ninivaggi, 2021).
What Cannot Be Felt May Be Repeated
Whatever the label, the insight is the same one Fraiberg's team arrived at through painstaking clinical work: what cannot be remembered, or allowed to be felt, is what gets repeated.
Anna Freud gave denial its name and its place in the architecture of the mind. Fraiberg, Adelson and Shapiro showed what happens when that same denial takes up residence not just in one person's psyche, but in the space between a parent and a child who has no words yet to name what's happening to them.
References
Freud, A. (1966). The ego and the mechanisms of defense (C. Baines, Trans.). International Universities Press. (Original work published 1936).
Read the text online
Fraiberg, S., Adelson, E., & Shapiro, V. (1975). Ghosts in the nursery: A psychoanalytic approach to the problems of impaired infant-mother relationships. Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 14(3), 387–421.
Kelland, M. (2017). Personality theory. OER Commons.
Read the resource
Kumari, S. (2024). Understanding defense mechanisms: How our minds protect us. International Journal of Research Culture Society, 8(6), 1–10.
Ninivaggi, F. J. (2021, February 13). Ghosts in the nursery of psychotherapies. Psychology Today.
Read the article
