October 2019
by Dr
Elizabeth McCardell, M. Couns., PhD
Over the past couple of months, I’ve been getting abusive phone calls from a
stranger projecting a whole lot of stuff on me. Turns out, other innocent
people, and writers to this paper, have been getting similar calls from this
person (identified by the common phone number). While the abuser isn’t
threatening violence, and thus, may not – yet – be charged with the misuse of telecommunications
(use of a carriage service to harass or offend), it is nevertheless a bit
unnerving. I’ve blocked the number, and advise others to do the same.
It’s incidents like these that provide
useful fodder for articles, such as this one. The lack of truth to her ravings point to classic psychological projection and
this is an interesting subject.
What is projection and why do people
engage in it?
Psychological projection is a defence
mechanism used to unconsciously cope with difficult feelings or emotions, positive and
negative. This coping mechanism arises essentially from a person’s Shadow side (as C. G. Jung
described it). It usually involves projecting undesirable feelings or emotions
onto someone else, rather than admitting to and dealing with the unwanted
feelings in oneself. The rants against me were mostly about how I, the
privileged one, never listens to the unprivileged. I couldn’t get a word in
edgewise in this bombardment of words; there was literally no room for me to
speak at all. Droll, eh, and ironic, since I wanted to invite her to come and
speak with me directly. This well describes, however, how projection works.
This woman can’t listen to anything anyone else says, so she projected this
incapacity onto me and I became, in her eyes, the one who cannot listen.
Psychological projection is common. As
Jung says, ‘Everything that is unconscious in ourselves we discover in our
neighbour, and we treat him accordingly.’ Such psychic processes are well and
truly obvious in everyday life, and politics (!). It is well to remember that
projections, like all other defence mechanisms, are an attempt at
self-soothing, although destined to failure, because they stir up too many
unmanageable emotions, rather than quietening them down in the attacker.
Unprovoked attack rarely manifests anything but rejection and resistance in the
one attacked. Dialogue is not possible.
It could be said that the psychological
projection expressed by our caller was something of an almost Herculean effort
to haul back some control of her ailing and fragile sense of self. Why else
would a person repeatedly ring strangers to yell at them?
In psychological terms, ownership of one’s
projections is part of the healing of the whole self. Jung was very clear about
this. His whole psychology was one that promoted individuation. Our task is to
recognize the subjective origin of our projections, withdraw them from the
outside world and to integrate this element of our personal into conscious awareness.
To be clear, individuation is the
transformative process whereby the personal and collective unconscious is
brought into consciousness, and what belongs to oneself is recognized as
separate from what belongs to others. The business of psychological projection
is actually quite useful for it identifies the unowned areas in our lives, thus
giving a signpost to what needs to be worked on within ourselves.
