In every process of projection, there is a sender, that is, the one who projects something onto someone else, and a receiver, the one on whom something is projected. Interestingly enough, these two show up as two highly important factors in the history of medicine. Sending is found in the conception widespread among native peoples of sickness projectiles, a magic arrow or some other, usually pointed missile that makes the person it hits sick. A god, demon, or an evil person shoots such magic "points" at people. Extracting the projectile causes the victim to be healed. In the Old Testament, God himself shoots such arrows (Job 6:4): "For the arrows of the Almighty are within me, the poison whereof drinketh up my spirit: the terrors of God do set themselves in array against me." Or there are invisible demonic powers (Psalm 91): "Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day; nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday." Among ordinary people, it is usually venomous slander that is experienced as such arrows. (Cf. Jeremiah 9:3,8; Psalm 64:4.) We might also note the relationship of the German word Krankheit, meaning "illness," and kränken, meaning "to wound emotionally." We still speak today of "barbs" and "pointed remarks." In India the word salya means "arrowhead," "thorn," or "splinter," and of the doctor who removes such arrows from the bodies of sick people, it is said that he functions "like a judge who removes the thorn of injustice from a trial." The thorn is obviously something like a bad affect that has created a legal uncertainty. Psychiatrists and psychologists know that pointed or sharp forms in patients' drawings and paintings represent destructive impulses. The positive projection, too, is a kind of arrow, which is why, for example, the god Amor and the Hindu god of love, Kama, carry bows and arrows. Buddha described the desire of love as "an arrow that digs savagely into the flesh." That it is more rarely evil people and more often gods or demons who send these arrows of illness is in agreement with the observations of modern psychologists that projections are not enacted by us, but happen unconsciously; that is, that they emanate from complexes or archetypes of the unconscious. (Demons = complexes; gods = archetypal images.) The Greek philosopher Democritus believed that the whole atmosphere was full of eidola (images) or dianoetikai phantasiai (imagined ideas), which hover about us in dreams but also affect us during the day. "Only a subtle mind can distinguish them; ordinary people confuse them with objects of the external world." Projection of one's own not consciously realized psychic contents brings about in the sender a loss of soul," one of the most feared illnesses among native peoples. This makes one apathetic, depressive, or susceptible to the compulsive thrall of people outside one. The Receiver The person onto whom someone else projects something is also affected-in the primitive view, he is hit by an arrow. If the receiver has a weak ego consciousness (as children do, for example), he will be easily influenced to act out what has been projected onto him. In the primitive view, this means that he is possessed. We feel compelled to relate to someone else's infatuation toward us, or we involuntarily do the evil thing to the enemy that he is expecting from us on the basis of his projection. Children often act out the unconscious shadow side of their parents-that which is hidden in them but is not consciously realized. That explains the known phenomenon that children of especially well-behaved parents often do particularly devilish things. "Preacher's children and miller's cow, seldom flourish anyhow," as the proverb says. WITHDRAWAL OF THE PROJECTION C. G. Jung distinguished five stages in the withdrawal of a projection: The initial situation is the archaic identification. An inner psychic content is experienced completely as the behavior of an outer object; for example, one might believe one has been bewitched by a stone. The stone itself is distinguished from the bewitching element, and the latter is described as an evil "spirit" in the stone. A judgment is made as to whether this spirit is good or evil. The spirit is declared to be an illusion. One asks the question "What could have led to this illusion?" and recognizes it, not as something outwardly real, yet as an inner psychic reality, and one attempts to integrate this.
— Marie-Louise von Franz
Von Franz is charting something the arrow image already knows: that sickness is not a condition but a transaction. There is always a sender and a receiver, a sender who loses something and a receiver who is made to carry it. The languages here accumulate precisely because the image is that ancient — Sanskrit, Hebrew, Old German, Greek — each civilization working out the same recognition that affliction travels and that the one who wounds is also depleted. *Kränken*, to wound emotionally; *Krankheit*, illness: the German root does not merely explain a metaphor, it insists that being hurt *is* being sick, that the categories were never separate.
What the passage quietly discloses is that the pneumatic route out — declaring the spirit an illusion, retiring to the purely inner register — is stage four of five, not the endpoint. Jung's five stages of projection-withdrawal culminate not in demythologizing the arrow but in recognizing the inner reality that produced it and attempting integration. The soul's content that was shot outward has to come back in. That is not comfortable. It does not look like healing in the modern sense; it looks like being pierced again, this time by something you can no longer attribute to a god, a demon, or a stone. What you discover at the end of withdrawal is that the arrow was always yours, which means the wound and the capacity to wound were yours too. Democritus's *eidola* hover in the atmosphere precisely because they have not yet been claimed.
Marie-Louise von Franz·Psychotherapy·1993