She puts the safety of her clone sisters first, but at the cost of her own stability. .
Despite the fact that she's struggling with a unknown lung disease, coughing out blood, and weak body overall, she spends all the hours in her biotech lab, researching endlessly for the way out of this continuous stream of hazards. Displacement is the second most prevalent defense mechanism Cosima utilizes. Her stressors often involve being reprimanded for her inability to discover something and daily annoyances, and when she is frustrated, she takes it out on the next person who interacts with her. As she was studying Katja Obinger's (another clone sister) hair and blood samples, she asked one of her acquaintances to analyze them for Cytochrome C, to which he jokingly asked what he would get in return. Having none of that, "You can have sexwith yourself." is the only appropriate response for a man who believes that a woman owes him anything. Niehaus has more important things to do than to satisfy the id of someone insignificant.
Unconscious Anxieties and Conflicts.
Not much is known about Niehaus's past besides her educational background. There is not enough canonically known information to draw conclusions from her childhood to determine any unresolved conflicts from that time. But in the present time, Cosima tries to underplay the pressure she's under from the other clones. The knowledge she holds about biology can to the discovery of their origins and the solutions to problems concerning their genetic makeup. With unresolved issues such as the possibility of being fertile (despite genetic programming for the otherwise) and consequential diseases, Cosima is forced to decipher the clone code by means which have never yet been tried. Whether there is an explanation for her drive to be constantly seeking answers, even to trivial matters, or an explanation for how fastidious her thought process and modes of doing/approaching things has become, has yet to be discovered in later seasons.
