Editing Coping (section)

===Otto Fenichel===
{{Main|Otto Fenichel}}
Otto Fenichel summarized early psychoanalytic studies of coping mechanisms in children as "a gradual substitution of actions for mere discharge reactions...[&] the development of the function of judgement" – noting however that "behind all active types of mastery of external and internal tasks, a readiness remains to fall back on passive-receptive types of mastery."<ref>{{cite book |first=Otto |last=Fenichel |title=The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis |location=London |year=1946 |pages=41–42, 53}}</ref>

In adult cases of "acute and more or less 'traumatic' upsetting events in the life of normal persons", Fenichel stressed that in coping, "in carrying out a 'work of learning' or 'work of adjustment', [s]he must acknowledge the new and less comfortable reality and fight tendencies towards regression, towards the misinterpretation of reality", though such rational strategies "may be mixed with relative allowances for rest and for small regressions and compensatory wish fulfillment, which are recuperative in effect".<ref>{{cite book |first=Otto |last=Fenichel |title=The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis |location=London |year=1946 |page=554}}</ref>