Projection

Projection is the psychological mechanism by which an unconscious content — most commonly a shadow content — is experienced as belonging to someone or something in the external world rather than to the self that carries it. It is the operative principle by which the unintegrated interior is met in the form of an exterior other.

Jung reads the twentieth century’s mass movements as a pathology of collective projection. “In accordance with the prevailing tendency of consciousness to seek the source of all ills in the outside world, the cry goes up for political and social changes which, it is supposed, would automatically solve the much deeper problem of split personality. Hence it is that whenever this demand is fulfilled, political and social conditions arise which bring the same ills back again in altered form. What then happens is a simple reversal: the underside comes to the top and the shadow takes the place of the light” (Jung 1957, the-undiscovered-self, §558). The frontier of the nation, the enemy of the class, the scapegoat of the tribe — each is a container for what the collective has refused to see in itself.

The withdrawal of a projection is a particle of individuation. The ethical stakes of the procedure are high: “we can now point a finger at the shadow. He is clearly on the other side of the political frontier, while we are on the side of good” (Jung 1957, §559). Jung’s diagnosis is that this is exactly the structure that must be refused if integration is to occur — within the individual and, by extension, within the polity.

Projection is not only pathological. In its positive form it is the means by which the unconscious reveals itself to consciousness: what is first seen in the other may, with work, be recognized as one’s own. The analytic hour is, in this sense, an extended work of projection-recognition.

Relationships

Primary sources

the-undiscovered-self (Jung 1957, §§558–559)
Psychology and Religion: West and East (Jung 1958)
von-franz-shadow-evil-fairy (von Franz 1974)