It is not difficult to recognize in everyday life what is meant by projection. It is the tendency to see in others peculiarities and ways of behaving which we ourselves display without being aware that we do. There is always at bottom a projection whenever we suffer from an excessive emotional fascination, whether of love or of hate. In other words projection is an involuntary transposition of something unconscious in ourselves into an outer object. The occurrence of projection stems in the last analysis from that original, universal psychological phenomenon which Jung calls "archaic identity," a state in which primitive man, the child and, to a degree, every adult as well is not differentiated from his environment and hence 1 In Freud's view we project onto outer objects only the wishes and impulses we repress. For Jung any unconscious contentnot only those which have been repressedcan be projected. Jung defines projection (Psychological Types, CW 6, par. 783) as "the expulsion of a subjective content into an object.... Projection results from the archaic identity... of subject and object, but is properly so called only when the need to dissolve the identity with the object has already arisen. This need arises when the identity becomes a disturbing factor, i. e., when the absence of the projected content is a hindrance to adaptation and its withdrawal into the subject has become desirable" (italics added). Jung makes a further distinction between an active and a passive projection, the latter being an act of "feeling-into," the former an act of judgment. page_77 Page 78 is more or less "interfused" with it. Our instinctive empathy with people, with animals and even with inanimate objects also has its source in archaic identity.2 In the concept of projection Jung created first and foremost an instrument for use in clearing up many misunderstandings between persons and groups, and in this practical application the concept is currently in rather wide use. But the withdrawal of a projection, especially when it involves negative contents which are taken as "evil" and which are projected onto other people, is a moral achievementthat is, an achievement in the area of feeling. The need for the withdrawal of a projection is always constellated at that moment when conscious or semiunconscious doubts about the rightness of one's own way of looking at things arise and when on the conscious level this view is fanatically defended. Doubt and fanaticism are therefore symptoms which indicate that the time is ripe for the withdrawal of some projection.
— Marie-Louise von Franz
Projection is not primarily an intellectual error — it is a moral one, and von Franz is precise about why. The withdrawal of a projected content, especially when it carries the charge of evil, is "an achievement in the area of feeling." Not an insight. Not a correction of cognition. Feeling. That distinction cuts against the natural therapeutic instinct, which reaches immediately for understanding as the cure.
Notice what von Franz identifies as the signal that withdrawal has become possible: not the calm recognition that one might be wrong, but the simultaneous presence of doubt and fanaticism. The ferocity of the defense and the underground tremor of uncertainty arrive together. This is not contradiction — it is the psyche's grammar at its most honest. The louder the certainty performed on the surface, the more the archaic identity is straining to hold. What looks like conviction is already beginning to release.
The practical consequence is worth sitting with. If you find yourself most intractable precisely where you most suspect yourself, that constriction is not a sign of deeper corruption — it is the phenomenology of a projection approaching its threshold. The dissolution is already working. The question is whether the feeling function is strong enough to bear what gets returned when the outer object is no longer carrying it.
Marie-Louise von Franz·C.G. Jung: His Myth in Our Time·1975