The more a person knows of himself and the less, therefore, of himself he projects onto others, the more objectively, illusionlessly, and genuinely he can relate to himself and to truly other people. Here ultimately lies the distinction between sympathy or infatuation and real love, or between hate and objective rejection and detachment. All progress in mutual understanding and improvement in relations between people depends on the withdrawal of projections.
— Marie-Louise von Franz
Von Franz is making a deceptively demanding claim here. On its surface this looks like a counsel of clarity — know yourself better, see others more accurately — but follow it another step and the demand becomes almost unbearable. Real love, she is saying, requires that you actually encounter the other person. Not the image you have built from your own unlived material, not the carrier of what you cannot bear in yourself, not the embodiment of what you most long to receive. The actual, irreducibly foreign other.
Most of what passes for love is, by this standard, still working its way through projection — still fundamentally an interior conversation. This is not moral condemnation; it is diagnosis. The soul reaches toward the other because contact with something genuinely external is what it cannot manufacture for itself, and yet it keeps dressing that other in its own costume before the encounter can begin. Withdrawal of projection is not an act of will; it is what happens when the soul stops needing the other to carry something it refuses to hold. Von Franz does not tell you how to get there. She tells you what the territory looks like when you do — more illusionless, not more comfortable. That is the important correction: clarity about another person is not warmth added, it is a different kind of seeing that warmth can, finally, move through.
Marie-Louise von Franz·Psychotherapy·1993