Ask a mind a question whose ground it doesn't reliably hold — human or machine — and it tends not to say 'I don't know.' Instead it defends the gap. This paper proposes that under coherence pressure, people and large language models reach for the same five directional defences — SHaDS: Smoothing, Hallucination, Affectation, Drift, Sycophancy — routing around honest contact with what occupies the gap. The pattern is read as a clinical-behavioural extension of Anna Freud's 1936 catalogue of defence mechanisms, set against Karpowicz's (2025) impossibility theorem, which proves hallucination-free inference is mathematically unreachable. Drawing on twenty years of clinical practice and a fourteen-year photographic corpus, the paper stakes one falsifiable prediction: that naming each defence, rather than performing it, measurably reduces it. Offered as hypothesis for research review, not as settled finding
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