Question

Ben's wife Rebecca is a field biologist who accepted a post at a remote research station in Antarctica and has been gone for over two months. Since Rebecca's departure, Ben has remodeled the kitchen, planted a vegetable garden, and is now hard at work building a new deck. Freud would probably describe Ben's burst of creative and productive activities as an example of:

a. rationalization.
b. sublimation.
c. projection.
d. reaction formation.

Answer 1

b. sublimation.

Step-by-step explanation:

Sigmund Freud has given defense mechanisms, through which a person tends to deal with unwanted impulses. He has mentioned ten defense mechanisms, and sublimation is one of them.

Sublimation: In psychology, sublimation is defined as the process of converting or transforming various undesirable urges or impulses into something desirable or things that can be considered as having little or no bad consequences. In other words, a person changes socially undesirable behavior into desirable behavior that can have a positive impact on a person's health and life.

Examples of unacceptable or undesirable behavior can be anger, jealousy, sexual impulse, etc.

In the question above, Freud would probably describe Ben's burst of creative and productive activities as an example of sublimation.