Now, as we know from psychotherapeutic experience, projection is an unconscious, automatic process whereby a content that is unconscious to the subject transfers itself to an object, so that it seems to belong to that object. The projection ceases the moment it becomes conscious, that is to say when it is seen as belonging to the subject.17 Thus the polytheistic heaven of the ancients owes its depotentiation not least to the view first propounded by Euhemeros,18 who maintained that the gods were nothing but reflections of human character. It is indeed easy to show that the divine pair is simply an idealization of the parents or of some other human couple, which for some reason appeared in heaven. This assumption would be simple enough if projection were not an unconscious process but were a conscious intention. It would generally be supposed that one's own parents are the best known of all individuals, the ones of which the subject is most conscious. But precisely for this reason they could not be projected, because projection always contains something of which the subject is not conscious and which seems not to belong to him. The image of the parents is the very one that could be projected least, because it is too conscious. 122 In reality, however, it is just the parental imagos that seem to be projected most frequently, a fact so obvious that one could almost draw the conclusion that it is precisely the conscious contents which are projected. This can be seen most plainly in cases of transference, where it is perfectly clear to the patient that the father-imago (or even the mother-imago) is projected on to the analyst and he even sees through the incest-fantasies bound up with them, without, however, being freed from the reactive effect of his projection, i. e., from the transference. In other words, he behaves exactly as if he had not seen through his projection at all. Experience shows that projection is never conscious: projections are always there first and are recognized afterwards.
— Carl Gustav Jung
Jung is cutting at something that defeats every rational approach to therapy: knowing something does not dissolve it. The patient sees the father-imago on the analyst clearly, names the transference, can even trace the incest-fantasy latent in it — and the reactive effect continues anyway. This is not stupidity or resistance in the ordinary sense. It is the evidence that consciousness and projection operate on entirely different rails.
What makes the parental imago the hardest case is also what makes it the instructive one. We assume the most familiar contents are the most conscious, and therefore the most available for withdrawal. Jung's reversal here is precise: familiarity is not consciousness. The parents are known as external figures long before they become internal ones, and the imago — the charged, fantasy-laden interior image — forms in the gap between the figure and the experience of the figure. That gap is not visible to the person living inside it.
The therapeutic implication is grimmer than it first sounds. Interpretation does not cure; insight is not transformation. The projection "ceases the moment it becomes conscious" — but consciousness, Jung is careful to show, is not what the patient in transference has achieved. What looks like seeing-through is still living-inside. The actual moment of withdrawal is not an insight-event at all. It is closer to something happening to the subject than something the subject does.
Carl Gustav Jung·The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious·1959