Defense mechanisms, Anna Freud, and the philosophy of self-knowledge — that's the focus of our first episode of Philosophy for Lunch.

We start with Anna Freud’s life and work, from growing up as Sigmund Freud’s youngest daughter to publishing The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense in 1936. Then we walk through some of the defense mechanisms you’ll recognize from everyday life: repression, projection, reaction formation, rationalization, sublimation, and displacement.

Along the way, we ask the philosophical questions her work raises:

• How much of yourself can you really know if your mind is actively hiding things from you?
• What happens to moral responsibility if our “reasons” are often after-the-fact stories?
• Is the examined life always better, or do we also need a little healthy opacity to stay human? ...