Health psychology/Defence mechanisms · Immaturelow yield

Idealisation

What it means

Attributing exaggeratedly positive qualities to another person (or oneself), seeing them as all-good. With its counterpart devaluation, it forms the two poles of splitting.

Worked example

A patient insists one doctor is "the only one who truly understands" and can do no wrong — until they later devalue them entirely.

In the exam

A patient describes her new therapist as utterly perfect and unlike anyone who has ever helped her, dismissing all her previous competent clinicians as useless.

What settles it

Idealisation is the all-good pole; splitting is the broader inability to integrate good and bad that swings between idealisation and devaluation.

Classically confused with

Splitting

Source: AMBOSS; Kernberg