DEFENSE MECHANISM OF THE MAIN CHARACTER IN LAURIE

This study is a descriptive qualitative study which aims at revealing how defense mechanisms are experienced by Melinda Sordino as the main character of Speak novel in overcoming her anxiety after being bullied physically and verbally at school. This study relies on Sigmund Freud’s defense mechanism theory. The data is the narration and dialogue in the narrative implying defense mechanism strategies used by the main character. The finding shows that the main character has repression, rationalization, regression, and reaction-formation as dominant strategies to to overcome the conflicts. Besides, she also applies projection, replacement, isolation, identification, sublimation as defense mechanisms strategies to solve her anxiety and psychological problems. Psychological approach is applied because the main character, like human’s psyche, needs to negotiate and survive psychologically from realitites which can not suit her ideal expectation.


INTRODUCTION
As a literary text, novel is a story with the prose form in long shape, this long shape means the story including the complex plot, many character and These conflicts can also be interpreted as the writer's stream of consciousness or phsychological conflicts, like anxiety, which can be viewed from phsychonalysis perspective.
Human tends to decrease tension for the purpose of decreasing anxiety and uses defense mechanisms for this purpose. Therefore, defense mechanisms serve the function of protecting individuals from anxiety.
Likewise, we feel anxiety when ego defense mechanisms fail to work properly. Anxiety is of crucial importance since it represents our core issues like fear of intimacy, fear of abandonment, fear of betrayal and low self-esteem (Tyson in Sarijaloo, 2016).
Sigmund Freud (in Gokdag, 2015)  Defense mechanism is the mental strategy used by the ego to continue blocking the harmful behavior while at the same time reducing anxiety (Gokdag, 2015, p. 348). There are some types of the defense mechanism proposed by Freud; a) Repression. This is a method of defense mechanism when a person remove miserable thoughts from her mind in order to not to remember them anymore. This defense mechanism works when a person experiences trauma as a painful and fearful event then she places the traumatic memory to her unconscious mind to prevent the memory from reaching her conscious mind. The person prevents the painful and fearful memory from reaching her conscious mind because she considers it as unpleasure memory. So, she turns the memory away and keeps it at a distance from her conscious mind. In other words, she wishes to forget the unpleasure memory to be unaccessible in her conscious mind (Freud, 2010, p. 102 (Freud, 2010(Freud, , p. 2194. Reaction formation works by converting a socially unacceptable feeling or trait into its opposite to cover up the person's real feeling or trait. c) Projection. It is when a person projects her own traits to someone else. She projects the traits to someone else because they can not be denied or repressed completely. Human mind has a very positive self image to feed the ego with praise in recognition from others. When this image is threatened by negative traits, she will have tendency to discard the negative traits by projecting them to someone else (Freud, 2010(Freud, , p. 2432 (Freud, 2010(Freud, , p. 2435. Regression can be caused by insecurity, fear, and danger of any unpleasure impulse or event. e) Sublimation.
Sublimation is method of defense mechanism when a person transform her repressed motives or emotions into more acceptable forms in social terms.
The transformation happens because the repressed motives that she has are considered as negative trait and they become unacceptable desires for her to release in conscious mind. But in other side, the person does not want to repress the desires, so she releases them by providing acceptable forms and by having social value (Freud, 2010(Freud, , p. 2827 Rationalization is method of defense mechanism when a person makes logical excuses to justify generally unacceptable behaviour. It is used in unconscious mind to avoid addressing the actual reasons for the behaviour. Rationalization can seem like logical and clear excuses but it is actually used to cover up the underlying emotions and motives (Freud, 2010(Freud, , p. 2333. Nevertheless, she still wants to react the emotion to make her feel relieved, so she replaces the actual object to another object that is less threatening as her target (Freud, 2010, p. 3266 (Freud, 2010, p. 198   where data is inductively analyzed and interpreted qualitatively (Creswell, 2009).
The source of the data is the Freud's mechanism theory, before interpretating it and drawing the conclusion.  (Anderson, 1999, p.5 Anything, just to get rid of this, these thoughts, whispers in my mind (Anderson, 1999, p.165 (Anderson, 1999, p.14 (Anderson, 1999, p.107).' She considered escaping from Spanish class as logically acceptable action as she does not go to Spain that day, and she does that to ignore many people bullying her, and to deal with her anxiety.

e) Sublimation
Melinda also transformed her repressed emotions of the oppression into more acceptable forms by drawing,'For a solid week, ever since the pep rally, I've been painting watercolors of trees that have been hit by lightning. I try to paint them so they are nearly dead,but not totally (Anderson, 1999, p.30)'.
She uses sublimation as her defense mechanism to handle her oppression where she releases the repressed emotion through her drawing.

f) Identification
In  (Anderson, 1999, p.57). At this point, Melinda uses identification as her defense mechanism. By stating that she makes a note to study David Petrakis, it means that she wishes to achieve David's qualification which she admired.

g) Turning again the self
Melinda goes to her mother's store to talk about her problems. When she stops at a traffic light, she sees that her mother skin and shirt looks bad. It BAHTERA: Jurnal Pendidikan Bahasa dan Sastra, Volume 19 Nomor 2 Juli 2020 http://journal.unj.ac.id/unj/index.php/bahtera/ P-ISSN : 0853-2710 E-ISSN : 2540-8968 331 BAHTERA : Jurnal Pendidikan Bahasa dan Sastra, Volume Juli 2020 is possibly because the mother is so busy in her work and she does not have time to pay attention at her appearance.
Nevertheless, Melinda does not blame her mother for the bad-looking appearance. Melinda uses turning against the self where she turns the anger away from the mother as the real object as the target but toward herself by blaming herself who does not fold more shirts for her mother.'I feel bad that I didn't fold more shirts for her (Anderson, 1999, p.73).'

h) Projection
Melinda is often oppressed because of the bullying. Therefore, she sometimes skips school to avoid all the things that she considers as threat for example people who always bully her.  (Anderson, 1999, p.87 (Anderson, 1999, p.97 (Anderson, 1999, p.117 shower' (Anderson, 1999, p.150