Defenses and Attachment in Clinical Practice: What Came First?

Richardson, Beath, and Boag (this issue) developed a questionnaire designed to measure attachment-related defense mechanisms with considerable promise for research, practice, and training. Their robust design and the sophisticated psychometric techniques used to generate and validate the measure are notable. The goal of this commentary is to situate the measure in contemporary research on defenses, draw a distinction between defenses linked specifically to attachment and defenses more generally, and to stimulate a constructive dialogue with the Defense Mechanisms Rating Scales (DMRS; Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021; Perry, 1990, 2014), a model and set of measures that has dominated defense mechanism research for half a century.