Isolation of Affect

Isolation, sometimes called isolation of affect, is a defense mechanism first described by Sigmund Freud in which a threatening thought is mentally separated from a person's other thoughts and feelings so that it triggers fewer distressing associations. Freud described the process as a kind of pause inserted after an unwanted thought, preventing it from connecting to the person's ongoing stream of ideas and so blunting its emotional impact. People who rely on this mechanism have been found to retain the memory of negative events while experiencing fewer of the cascading distressing associations the events would otherwise provoke.