Isolation

Isolation, sometimes called isolation of affect, is a defense mechanism first described within psychoanalytic theory by Sigmund Freud, related to repression but distinct from it in several ways. It works by creating a gap between an unpleasant or threatening thought and a person's other thoughts and feelings, so that by minimizing the associative links running from that thought to the rest of a person's mental life, the threatening thought is remembered less often and is less able to damage a person's self-esteem or self-concept. Freud illustrated the idea with the example of someone beginning to describe one train of thought, pausing briefly, and then moving on to an unrelated subject, arguing that the pause itself lets the person signal, in effect, that they will not allow that thought to connect associatively with anything else in their mind.