20 September 2017: "It's like when your roommate is working a really hard math problem and he can't do it, so he yells at you for being too loud." --a student in my ENGL 301 class today, providing an example of "displacement."
It can be so much fun to teach literary theory to these students, in part because they teach me new stuff and make me laugh at the same time. This student's example of this particular psychological defense (part of our discussion of psychoanalytic theory) is spot on--and way too specific to be purely imagined. Need more evidence? He was also ready with an example of "projection": "When your roommate doesn't do anything for the apartment and then makes that complaint about you." When we teased him about these examples, he said, "This chapter helped me work some stuff out." Ha!
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