VOLUME 1. Mobilizing the Self

Part 2. Manipulating the Self

VIII. Projections

Experiment 17: Discovering Projections

A projection is a trait, attitude, feeling, or bit of behavior which actually belongs to your own personality but is not experienced as such; instead, it is attributed to objects or persons in the environment and then experienced as directed toward you by them instead of the other way around. The projector, unaware, for instance, that he is rejecting others, believes that they are rejecting him; or, unaware of his tendencies to approach others sexually, feels that they make sexual approaches to him.

This mechanism, like retroflection and introjection, functions to interrupt mounting excitement of a kind and degree with which the person cannot cope. It seems to require the following: (1) that you be aware of the nature of the impulse involved; but (2) that you interrupt the aggressive approach to the environment which would be necessary for its adequate expression; with the result (3) that you exclude it from the outgoing activities of your “I”; nevertheless, since you are aware that it does exist, then (4) it must come from outside—notably from a person or persons in your environment; and (5) it seems forcibly directed toward you because your “I”, without realizing it, is forcibly interrupting your own outwardly directed impulse.

A transparent example of the projection mechanism is given by the inhibited woman who is forever complaining that men are making improper advances to her.

For projection to occur, retroflections and confluences also are necessary, just as they are in introjection; and, in general, as we have said before, the neurotic mechanisms are all functionally related to one another and interlocking. In retroflections both components of the conflict in here in the personality, but, because of their clinch, the person in effect loses part of his environment, for before his outgoing impulse can come to grips with objects or persons, he intercepts it with his retroflecting behavior.

In projections one is aware of the impulse and of the environmental object, but he does not identify with and carry through his aggressive approach—and thereby loses the sense that he is feeling the impulse. Instead, he stands stock still and, without realizing it, waits for his problem to be solved for him from outside.

These mechanisms constitute neurosis only when inappropriate and chronic; all of them are useful and healthy when employed temporarily in particular circumstances. Retroflection is healthy behavior when it constitutes holding back for the sake of caution in a situation of genuine danger. Introjection of the dull and unimportant material of a required school course may be healthy when one has the chance to spew it forth and relieve himself of it on the final examination. Examples of healthy temporary projection are the activities of planning and anticipating. In them one “feels oneself’ in a future situation—projects oneself into the environment—and then, when one follows through, in a practical way, integrates oneself with the project. Likewise, in certain kinds of sympathy one feels oneself into the other person and solves one’s own problem by solving his. Imaginative artists alleviate their problems by projecting into their work. When a child at a very early age projects his teddy-bear out of the crib to the floor, this may mean that he himself wants to be there. What makes all these mechanisms unhealthy, of course, is the structural fixing on some impossible or non-existent object, the loss of awareness, the existence of isolated confluences, and the consequent blocking of integration.

The fear of rejection is crucial with every neurotic, so we can profitably begin our experimentation with this. The picture of being rejected—first by his parents and now by his friends—is one that the neurotic goes to great lengths to establish and maintain. While such claims may have substance, the opposite is also certainly true —that the neurotic rejects others for not living up to some fantastic ideal or standard which he imposes on them. Once he has projected his rejecting onto the other person, he can, without feeling any responsibility for the situation, regard himself as the passive object of all kinds of unwarranted hardship, unkind treatment, or even victimization.

In your own case, by whom did you or do you feel rejected? Your mother, father, sister, brother? Do you bear them a grudge for it? On what grounds do you reject them? How do they fail to measure up?

Now call up in fantasy some acquaintance. Do you like or dislike this Person X? Do you like or dislike this or that trait or action? Visualize him and speak to him or her aloud. Tell him that you accept this mannerism or characteristic, won’t have any more of that one, can’t stand it when he does this, etc. Repeat the experiment many times. Do you talk stiltedly? Lamely? Self-consciously? Do you feel what you say? Does anxiety develop? Do you feel guilty, afraid that you might spoil the relationship irrevocably by your frankness? Assure yourself of the difference between fantasy and material reality, for this is just what the projector confuses. Now comes the decisive question: Do you feel that it is you who are rejecting on the very same grounds on which you believe yourself rejected? Do you feel that people “high hat" you? If so, can you be aware of instances in which you do or would like to "high hat” others? Do you reject in yourself the very things you think others reject you for? If you are skinny, fat, have buck teeth—or whatever it is about yourself that you don’t like—do you feel that others are as scornful of these shortcomings as you are yourself? Also, can you notice yourself attributing things unwanted in yourself to others? If you take unfair advantage of someone, do you say, “He was just about ready to do it to me?”

It is not always easy to discriminate between what is genuinely observed and what is imagination. Error speedily dissolves when it produces a clear contradiction of some sort; projected behavior is then recognized as crazy, hallucinatory, and you say, “I don’t know how I ever could have thought that.” But, for the most part, the projector can find “proofs” that the imagined is the observed. Such rationalizations and justifications are always available to the person who wishes to find them. In the subtleties and many-sided aspects of most situations the projector (up to the stage of true paranoia) can fasten onto a true detail, perhaps some genuine but insignificant grievance, and then exaggerate and embroider it fantastically. Thus he does his damage—or, in his language, is damaged.

A person’s unfelt need to reject Person X will lead to finding something in his own behavior which he thinks accounts for bur does not justify X in rejecting him. If X were operating on the basis which the projector supposes and would actually reject him, then the projector’s purpose would be accomplished—namely, it would bring about their separation, which is precisely what the projector wants without being aware of it.

Suppose one has an appointment with Person X and he is late in arriving. If, without further evidence, one jumps to the conclusion that this is a sign of contempt, then one is projecting one’s own contemptuousness.

In everyday life the common case of paranoic projection is, of course, the jealous husband or wife. If you are prone to such jealousies and are continually suspecting and “proving” infidelity, see whether you yourself are not repressing the wish to be unfaithful in the very way that you attribute to your spouse. Apply the suspect details to yourself as clues—that is, you would go about it in just that way, make the clandestine phone-call, etc.

A second important source of paranoic jealousy is also a projection. The jealous partner represses his (or her) own homosexual impulse, and therefore imagines that the partner loves another man or another woman—and calls up images of them together. The epithets he then directs at the fancied lovers are the very ones that he would apply to his own taboo impulse.

In all these cases the degree of evidence or contradiction is unimportant. If one is a jealous husband or a touchy mother-in-law, it does no good to be proved wrong, for the same situation will repeat itself with other flimsy evidence. The projector clings to his passive-suffering role and avoids going outward.

An extremely important and dangerous class of projections is prejudice: race-prejudice, class-prejudice, snobbery, anti-semitism. misogyny, etc. In every such case, along with other factors, the following projection is operating: to the vilified groups are attributed traits which really belong to the prejudiced person, but which he represses from awareness. Hating and refusing to come to terms with his own “bestiality” (which is often, when it appears in proper context, nothing but a useful drive of the organism), he feels and “proves” that the despised race or group is “bestial.”

Consult your own views on such matters as candidly as possible and see how many of them are prejudices. A useful sign is that particular salient “confirming” instances loom in your mind. These individual cases, of course, are quite irrelevant in issues which involve masses of people and which can be intelligently considered only in terms of cold statistics. When you notice such striking confirming instances of any pct idea of yours, look to see if you do not yourself possess the trait.

Contrary to the view that this attitude of the passive-suffering projector belongs only to masochistic and passive-feminine types, we believe it typical of modem dissociated man. It is imbedded in our language, our world-attitude, our institutions. The prevention of outgoing motion and initiative, the social derogation of aggressive drives, and the epidemic disease of self-control and self-conquest have led to a language in which the self seldom does or expresses anything; instead, “it” happens. These restrictive measures have also led to a view of the world as completely neutral and “objective” and unrelated to our concerns; and to institutions that take over our functions, that are to “blame” because they “control” us, and that wreak on us the hostility which we so carefully refrain from wielding ourselves—as if men did not themselves lend to institutions whatever force they have!

In such a world of projections a man, instead of raging, is “possessed” by a temper that he cannot “control.” Instead of thinking, a thought “occurs” to him. He is “haunted by” a problem. His troubles “worry” him—when, indeed, he is worrying himself and anybody else he can.

Alienated from his own impulses, yet unable to obliterate the feelings and acts to which they give rise, man makes “things” out of his own behavior. Since he then does not experience it as him-self-in-action, he can disclaim responsibility for it, try to forger or hide it, or project it and suffer it as coming from the outside. He does not dream or wish, but the dream “comes to him.” He does not shine in glory, but abstract glory becomes a thing to die for. He does not progress and want to progress, but Progress, with a capital P, becomes his fetish.

When the early psychoanalysts introduced the concept of the Id or It as the source of drives and dreams, they were expressing this powerful truth: personality is not restricted to the narrow sphere of the “I” and its “sensible” self-controlled little thoughts and plans; these other drives and dreams are not idle shadows but real facts of the personality. But, having achieved this insight, orthodox analysis did not sufficiently insist on the next step—to loosen and enlarge the habits of the “I” and change it from a fixed form into a system of shifting processes, so that it can feel the Id-facts as its own facts, use its hallucinations (as a child does in play), and wield its drives for creative adjustment.

A careful criticism of our habitual language points the way to such loosening and adjustment. Let us reverse the process of alienation, self-conquest, and projection by reversing the “it” language. The aim is to come to realize again that you are creative in your environment and are responsible for your reality—not to blame, but responsible in the sense that it is you who lets it stand or changes it.

Examine your verbal expressions. Translate, as if they were in a foreign language, those sentences in which “it” is subject and you are object into sentences in which “I” is the subject. For instance, "It occurred to me that I had an appointment” translates into “I remembered that I had an appointment.” Furthermore, setting yourself in the center of sentences that concern you, look for concealed indefinite expressions. Often, for instance, “I must do this” means either “I want to do this” or “I don’t want to do it and won’t, and meantime I am making excuses” or “I am keeping from doing something else.” Also, recast sentences in which you are meaningfully an object into sentences expressing the fact that although you are object, you are experiencing something. For instance, change, “He hits me” into “He hits me and I am being hit”; “He tells me” into “He says something to me and I listen to it.”

Attend to the detailed content of your “it” expressions; translate the verbal structure into visual fantasy. If you say, “A thought struck me,” just where and how did it strike? Did it use a weapon? Whom did you want to strike at the time? If you say, “My heart aches,” are you aching for something with all your heart? If you say. “I have a headache,” are you contracting your muscles so that you hurt your head—or even in order to hurt your head?

Listen to and translate other people’s language in the same way. This will reveal to you a good deal about their interpersonal relationships. Eventually you will understand that, as in art, although the content of what is said is important, it is much more the structure, the syntax, the style, that reveals character and underlying motivation.

Some reactions to this experiment are as follows:

“. ... You must think we have the intelligence of a child!”

“The last part of this experiment amounts to a gross dabbling in semantics. Translating ‘it’ phrases is about as constructive in psychological terms as doing a crossword puzzle.”

“People have told me that I say ‘I’ too- much, and in writing letters I’ve had to search around for substitutes so as not to seem egotistical.”

“I don’t believe that the amount of projecting that most people do is more than is healthy. From reading these instruction sheets I get the impression that the authors regard the whole world as filled with paranoids. It seems to me this indicates some projection on the part of the authors!”

“I was amazed to discover how often I used the impersonal form of speech. ‘It occurs to me. . . . ,’ ‘It happened that. . . .,’ etc., all seem to be very common and I use them quite extensively. As I try consciously to change the syntax of my speech, I can feel a heightened awareness of the immediate environment and how I am responsible for it. I can make a great deal of sense out of this—I almost said, ‘It makes a great deal of sense.’ I shall keep this up, for I find it most important.”

“I have a friend whom I tend to criticize because she spends so little time on her school work. Just before exams she crams, but the rest of the time she uses for going out and having fun. She does it quite openly, and doesn’t seem ashamed. I, on the other hand, stay home with a book open in my hand. What I’ve just realized is that this is just a pretense of studying, and I might better spend my time doing what she does!”

“Changing ‘it’ into ‘I’ has been quite an eye-opener for me. When I’ve dropped something. I’ve caught myself explaining, ‘It dropped out of my hand,’ or when I’ve missed my train because I dawdled around, I’ve complained, ‘It went off and left me.’ Just the same, some of these home-truths are pretty hard to take!”

“When I take unfair advantage of someone, I don’t say, ‘He was just about to do it to me.’ Instead, I say, ‘He was a fool not to do it first.’”

“I feel rejecting toward my sister because she treats my father like a bum. What I’ve just found out, though, is that I’m condemning her for expressing something that I hold back. Actually, I’m pretty sore that he hasn’t done more for us. He’s one of those persons with no other ambition than just to be able to scrape by.”

“The other day I felt that my father was rejecting me by siding with my brother on an issue. Recalling this experiment, I examined my own attitude. Much to my surprise I found that I was the one who was really rejecting the help and advice they both were trying to give me.”

Experiment 18: Assimilating Projections

In the moving picture theatre it is obvious to everyone except small children that the pictures do not emanate from the screen but are reflections of light-patterns cast upon it by the projector. What can appear on the screen, which is simply a blank surface, is strictly contingent on what is on the film in the machine. On the other hand, when a person projects parts of his personality it ordinarily is not upon a blank surface but upon a screen—another person, object, situation—which already possesses in its own right some degree of what is projected upon it. We project onto persons who are “appropriate screens”—that is, who manifest enough of a particular trait or attitude to make it easy for us to justify loading them with our share of it as well.

Abstractions, concepts, theories can also serve as projection-screens. A remarkable case of this occurs in the current terminology of psychotherapy. The system of muscular contractions by which the neurotic attacks and squeezes his spontaneous impulses is called (by Wilhelm Reich) his “character-armor.” This gives it the status of an “objective” barrier that must somehow be attacked and broken through. Actually it is the person’s own aggression turned against himself. Instead of regarding this armor as a dumb object, a shell or rigid crust to be crushed, surely the appropriate therapeutic technique is to interpret it as misdirected activities of the person himself. On such a basis he will become able to say, “I have a backache and a stiff stomach—that is, I contract my back till it hurts and I am cutting off indecent movements of the pelvis and suppressing evil desires.” If this is pursued, he will then say, “I hate sex and my sexual desires,” and then it will be possible to work on the person’s false identification with the social taboo and try to- dissolve what he has introjected. In other words, in such a case we must first undo the projection (“I am suffering from my armor”), then the retroflection (“I stifle my pelvis”), and then the introjection (“I hate sex”).

No doubt the most important abstract projection-screen is conscience or moral law. It is abstract in the sense that the dictates of conscience are verbalized as “Society demands” or “Morality requires,” when actually it is the person himself demanding or requiring in the name of society or morality! Conscience is always aggressive in its manifestations, for, like any screen, it reflects back to us what we project upon it. In this connection consider the following obvious facts: it is not those who live most “cleanly,” with unbending rectitude, with continuous attention to the rules, who have the lightest consciences. Far from it! Their consciences are forever hounding and upbraiding them.

Is it their demanding consciences that make them restrict themselves and walk the tight-rope of propriety? In your own case consider some escapade in which you succeeded and had a good time. Under those circumstances your conscience gave you little trouble; but if you failed, got caught, or were disappointed, then you felt guilty and your conscience told you should not have done it. Logically we must say that it is the person’s anger against the frustrating obstacles—which anger, however, he cannot vent nor even feel as such because of his identification with (introjection of) the social standards—that now he projects into his conscience. Then he suffers under its lash.

It is not the introjected standard that gives strength to the conscience; it merely provides the nucleus—the appropriate screen upon which the person may project aggression. This is shown by the fact that conscience is always more demanding than the taboos and sometimes makes demands that are even unheard of socially. The strength of conscience is the strength of one's own reactive anger!

Perfectionism is another projection-screen. This is based on the so-called ego-ideal (as distinct from super-ego or conscience). While conscience serves, as we have said, as projection screen for aggressions and cruel demands that the person dissociates from himself, the ego-ideal receives by projection his dissociated love and admiration. Such dissociated love is often homosexual; and homosexual love can frequently lie analyzed as a still earlier projection of a more primary self-love—which was a retroflection that one was punished for or “shamed out of.”

To dissolve irrational conscience you must take two steps: First, translate from ‘‘My conscience or morality demands . . .” to “I demand from myself . . that is, change the projection to a retroflection. Second, reverse this in both directions to “I demand from X” and “X (e.g., society) demands from me.” You must differentiate the actual compulsion of society from both your private demands and your introjections. In your conscience are you nagging, threatening, blackmailing, casting sad, reproachful glances? If you concentrate on these fantasies you will find how much of your moral duty is your own masked attack, how much consists of particular introjected influences, and how much is rational.

Do not be afraid that by dissolving conscience you will become a criminal or an impulsive psychopath. You will be surprised, when you allow organic self-regulation to develop and your outgoing drives to contact other persons, how the principles that you ought to live by will seem to emerge from your very bones and will be obviously appropriate for living out regardless of the social situation you are in.

Delinquency is to a large extent a matter of inaccurate orientation, a misunderstanding of the person’s role in society. As Socrates said long ago, evil is simply error. Pathological delinquency is frequently characterized by an over-stern conscience. As with self-control, so with conscience: too much self-control leads to nervous breakdowns; too much conscience to moral breakdowns. Submission to conscience is identification with rigid principles that do not work and are always lacking in charity. Organic function and self-awareness mean appreciation of concrete situations. Conscience imposes a duty and accomplishes very little work; aware function is interested, attracted, and gets the job done.

When you come to the second step of dissolving conscience, namely, reversing what you demand from yourself to a demand on X, you will experience the greatest reluctance, for accepting your conscience as part of yourself means admitting to powerful dictatonal desires and demands on other people—to be their conscience! You can, of course, become a moralist and try to make us all suffer; or let us hope you will restrict yourself to fantasy, and there work out your lust to be our ruler and our judge until you have developed a more integrated orientation and contact with the world. It will change your notions of conscience when you realize how the same intolerance that was invested in your conscience now shows up in your own cravings.

The projector throws outward his unwanted feelings, but he does not get rid of them. The only way actually to get rid of an “unwanted feeling” is to accept it, express it and thus discharge it. Projections are still bound to the person, just as repressed material is still “in” the person. The projector is connected with his projected omnipotence by awe, with his projected aggression by fear. Thus, it is not possible for the prejudiced person to rid himself of his “bestiality” simply by projecting it onto the vilified group; he must also become an antisemite, an anti-vivisectionist, or what not, and ruin his life with such idiocies. The distinction between a prejudice and some simple, foolish notion that one is too lazy or unconcerned to correct can be made in terms of whether you can let the matter go. If you cannot—if it is an imminent, haunting danger—then you have a prejudice.

In dreams projection of aggression becomes nightmares. Dreams with projected dental aggression, where you are threatened by crocodiles, dogs, the vagina dentata, are typical for introjectors. In attempting to interpret a dream, at the beginning, at least, regard all persons in it and all the features of it as projections—that is, as parts of your own personality. After all, you are the maker of the dream, and whatever you put into it must be what is in you and therefore available for constructing the dream.

Just as with dreams, many “memories” are projections of the present situation. This frequently occurs in psychoanalysis with respect to childhood memories. The transference (emotional relation to the analyst) is construed as the reliving of the childhood events, when the simple facts of the analytic situation are sufficient to account for whatever happens, without reference to the past at all. For example, the patient, angry with his analyst in the present situation, does not express his anger openly, but brings up memories of the times when his father “mistreated” him in similar wavs. To assimilate such projections it is not necessary to go roundabout through the long memories when the relevant events happen under one’s nose. Whether the patient says, “You are bored,” or “You think such and such of me,” or “You want to be rid of me.” the projection is obvious.

Your “reality” (what to you is the real world) is playing either of two functions: it is cither the concernful environment of your needs and is known by sharp, interesting figures against empty grounds, or it is a screen for your projections. If the latter, you will attempt to make the projections conform with observation—you will always be seeking proofs, making mountains out of molehills, or otherwise distorting your perspective.

Instead, do the following: go through a period in which you say to everything, Tat Twam Asi—that otherness is myself! And do the same on any subsequent occasion when you feel a violent reaction, particularly of fear or passive helplessness. Be on the watch for projected initiative, rejection, admiration, aggression. Think yourself into the shoes of the aggressor, admirer, rejecter, foolhardy one. More often than not, the reversal will click.

Some reactions to this experiment are as follows:

“The instructions to ‘think yourself into the shoes of the aggressor, admirer, et al. and more often than not the reversal will click’ is the perfect final note for you to end on. It really caps the climax of absurdity!”

“I believe it will be a very long time before I can accept responsibility for all my projections, for I’ve scattered the parts of my personality pretty widely. But I am going to continue to put myself into all my various shoes, for, as nearly as I can judge at this time, all the shoes do fit!”

“I tried the Tat Twam Asi experiment and discovered that I have an over-stern conscience. In time I hope to reduce it substantially, but I can see that it’s going to take time.”

“Just as taking responsibility for one’s behavior doesn’t necessarily mean taking blame for it, I suppose it’s just as unwarranted to take the credit for it. So long, though, as I continue to think in moralistic terms, I’m finding it exhilarating and releasing to take credit for what I do and to give credit to others for their actions. More and more I am noticing that when I or the people I know suffer a defeat, it almost always can be recognized to be, at least in part, an ‘inside job.’”

“I ‘dissolved’ some irrational conscience that I’ve had as far back as I can remember. I’ve always felt that I must complete any job I start and, further than that, I must complete it in a given measure of time (in one day, for instance). In some specific instances I’ve recently stated it as ‘My conscience demands that I finish this today.’ Then I amplified it to, ‘My conscience demands that I finish the job today even though I have plenty of time later.’ My foolishness became perfectly clear, though, when I carried it on to, ‘Society demands from me that I complete this job today,’ for it was obvious that society was doing no such thing. Without any fireworks of an emotional sort this has made a radical change in my attitude toward my work. When I start a job now it’s without the hopped-up melo-dramatics (the-die-is-cast-and-there’s-no-turning-back sort of feeling) but instead I realize there’s plenty of time and if anything more important should come up before I get this job finished, I can give it priority without the world’s coming to an end. When I look back at the way I was operating, I wonder, ‘How stupid can you get?’”

“You’ll probably diagnose this with some fancy name, but I intend to get it off my chest just the same. In your attempt to induce a ‘permissive’ atmosphere, you bend too far the other way. With a casualness that can’t be casual, you tell us how to masturbate, vomit, and choke pillows. You are moralistic ail the way through, although not in the ordinary way. You are trying to get us to introject your views in place of the ones we now have. Do you go to sleep at night happy in the thought that at this very minute countless people are vomiting up their insides for you?”

“I had trouble at first getting the hang of what was involved in putting myself in the shoes of all these other people who seemed so different from me. I wasn’t aware of projecting and the whole thing fell flat. Then I figured that maybe I could sneak up on it by trying first to notice when I thought other people were projecting. Boy, what a revelation! I experienced what away back you called the 'aha! phenomenon.’ The time when it hit me right between the eyes was at a committee meeting to select candidates for election to a club that I belong to. Whenever a particular name came up and somebody wanted to give it a thumbs-down, he had to state his reasons. Well, the reasons he would give for disliking the candidate and not wanting him in the club would amount to a listing of his own 'worst faults'. After seeing this son of thing happen I sure got the point about trying on the other fellow’s shoes and checking on whether they fit. Sad to say, they do!”