Is Psychological Projection a Good Idea?
Once in a while I’d like to use this blog to answer questions people have asked me that might interest others. This time it’s the psychological term “projection.” Technically, the word refers to a person who is unconsciously disturbed by some matter and instead of owning up to it finds it in someone else. Say a person has a tendency to lie but accuses someone else of lying when there is no evidence. We might say that he’s projecting. Sometimes we use the word more loosely to mean that a person assumes something about another person, when he really doesn’t know the facts. I do a lot of public speaking, and often I hear people making assumptions about me because they don’t know me as a person but only as an author. You could say that they’re projecting these things onto me. Yet another form of projection has to do with belief. Freud described the notion of God the father as a projection of one’s own parent into the sky. People who talk about projections also recommend dissolving them or withdrawing them—taking them back since they belong to you in the first place.
Although I certainly know that people make assumptions about me that have little relation to the person I know myself to be, I wouldn’t call this “projection.” For one thing, “projection” is one of those words that come too easily to our lips. Sometimes projection seems to describe pretty well what’s going on, but more often the situation is far more complicated. I’d rather use fresh words that describe with some subtlety and complexity what is going on in this particular situation. Once I was standing in the back of a hall just before giving a lecture to a large crowd. Two women standing next to me were talking about me. “He’s only here to give a talk so he can make more money,” one said to the other. The fact was that I was doing the talk for nothing as a favor to the sponsoring group. Should I say that the women were projecting onto me, or were they angry about having to pay for the lecture or angry about public speakers who presume to know something the audience doesn’t. I’d rather investigate the problem than pack it into a snowball word like projection.
These days I frequently quote a passage from Thoreau’s Walden where he says he saw blue angels in the shimmering waves of Walden Pond. Does it serve us to say that he was projecting angels into the water? I don’t think so. I’d rather understand Thoreau as a mystical person who could look at something physical and have his spiritual imagination waken and come into play. The mystical explanation is richer and is a practice we could all emulate. Projection pathologizes the experience. It also reduces an enchanted world to the problematical mind of the person beholding a spiritual dimension in ordinary life. We move from an animated world to a projecting person. We hyper-subjectivize our experience, to use an awkward word. So, in general I prefer to avoid the word “projection” altogether and instead use more informative and precise language for what is going on.
As a therapist I’m not in the business of withdrawing projections. If my client is making unwarranted assumptions, we can discuss that without giving it a pejorative label. If someone is making assumptions about me that have no basis, I can discuss them without giving them a psychoanalytical cachet by diagnosing with the term projection. If we must talk about projections, I’d like to see them as interesting forms of imagination, not always negative and not always representative of a person’s repressed unconscious. Many of my “projections” come from a desire to see the world in a much better light. Projections can lead us deeper into the world, and so instead of withdrawing them I might like at times to foster them, to do more projecting than less. But, of course, I wouldn’t want to call them projections.
The biggest problem with talk of projections is that we reduce a fascinating world of imagination to a psychological syndrome. We limit an entire conversation about assumptions and perceptions to a single, unrevealing word. Projection is a lazy tool, a word that doesn’t say as much as we hope to say and gives the illusion of presto magico!—we have unveiled a complicated, self-serving and neurotic twist of linguistic manipulation. My guess is that most of the time there is no manipulation going on at all. We are simply trying to see and say something and getting it rather wrong. But if we stay on the track, instead of withdrawing it, we may arrive at the desired and accurate observation. I never noticed James Hillman, the sharpest psychologist of all time, or Ernest Hemingway, the sharpest observer and narrator of all time, ever use the word projection.









