The habit of tracking projection outward — onto a partner, a therapist, a god — is so deeply ingrained that we rarely notice the prior activity Hillman is pointing toward here. Before anything reaches the external screen, the interior is already doing it: anima projecting a particular quality of animus onto other inner figures, animus casting its own light or shadow back, the whole process running beneath the level of what we call reflection. Ruland's phrase is the precise one — "violent interpenetration" — and Hillman borrows it deliberately. This is not a gentle interpretive overlay. Something intrudes on something else and transforms it, not by consent but by contact.

What this complicates is the familiar therapeutic promise that you can "take back" your projections and thereby achieve clarity. That promise usually imagines a movement from outside to inside — retrieve what you cast onto others and you'll see more accurately. But if projection is already an interior event, running between personified strata of the psyche itself, there is no final resting-place of clean perception waiting at the end of the retrieval. The anima figure you carry is already projecting the shape of an animus you haven't consciously chosen. The work is not retrieval but inhabitation — learning to read a process that was never under your management to begin with.