It does this most vividly by projection, by extrapolating its contents into an object, which then reflects back what had previously lain hidden in the unconscious. Projection can be observed at work everywhere, in mental illness, in ideas of persecution and hallucinations, in so-called normal people who see the mote in their brother's eye without seeing the beam in their own, and finally, in extreme form, in political propaganda. [610] Projections have what we might call different ranges, according to whether they stem from merely personal conditions or from deeper collective ones. Personal repressions and things of which we are unconscious manifest themselves in our immediate environment, in our circle of relatives and acquaintances. Collective contents, such as religious, philosophical, political and social conflicts, select projection-carriers of a corresponding kind-Freemasons, Jesuits, Jews, Capitalists, Bolsheviks, Imperialists, etc.
— Carl Gustav Jung
Projection is the soul's way of staying blind while still seeing. What has been pushed down doesn't disappear — it relocates, finding a host in the nearest available face or the most convenient enemy. The mote-and-beam image Jung reaches for is exact: the beam is not invisible, it is intolerable to see, and so the eye turns outward with tremendous urgency and precision, magnifying in the other exactly what it cannot bear to locate in itself.
What the passage adds to that familiar observation is the question of range. Personal repressions find personal carriers — the difficult neighbor, the impossible parent, the colleague who seems to embody everything wrong. But collective contents require collective carriers, and here the mechanism scales catastrophically. A society that cannot metabolize its own violence, its own failure, its own shadow-material, will find a people or a class or a movement to carry it. The historical list Jung offers — Freemasons, Jesuits, Jews, Capitalists, Bolsheviks — is not a list of ideological opponents. It is a diagnostic record of what Europe could not look at in itself, externalized onto bodies.
The range of a projection, then, is a map of how deep the avoidance goes. Small projections name private debts; vast ones name civilizational ones.
Carl Gustav Jung·Civilization in Transition·1964