a concept developed in psychoanalysis that describes the defense of one’s own self from a powerful threatening feeling of anxiety or other disorganizing emotional experiences (for example, grief). They differ in that they concern the boundaries between the external world and their own self, as a rule, seriously violating the principle of reality; act in a common, undifferentiated way throughout the individual’s sensory space, fusing cognitive, affective, and behavioral parameters together. The p.z.m. includes isolation, negation, omnipotent control, primitive idealization and devaluation, projective and introjective identification, and splitting. It is assumed that these are the ways in which young children naturally comprehend the world, and accordingly, in the course of growing up, should transform into mature higher defenses.