We all view people through our coloured lenses. Is it possible that you have viewed a situation or person through your lenses today, which may be tainted in some way?
Imagine what it could be like to view another through clear lenses, without your past projecting onto the screen... Each moment we have a choice to re-evaluate our beliefs.
According to Sigmund Freud, projection is a psychological defense mechanism whereby one "projects" one's own undesirable thoughts, motivations, desires, and feelings onto someone else. 'Emotions or excitations which the ego tries to ward off are "spit out" and then felt as being outside the ego...perceived in another person'.[4] It is a common process.[5] The related defence of 'projective identification differs from projection in that the impulse projected onto an external object does not appear as something alien and distant from the ego because the connection of the self with that projected impulse continues'.[6]
In one example of the process, a person might have thoughts of infidelity with respect to a spouse or other partner. Instead of dealing with these undesirable thoughts consciously, the subject unconsciously projects these feelings onto the other person, and begins to think that the other has thoughts of infidelity and that the other may be having an affair. In this way, the subject may obtain 'acquittal by his conscience - if he projects his own impulses to faithlessness on to the partner to whom he owes faith'.[7] In this sense, projection is related to denial, arguably the only more primitive defense mechanism than projection, which, like all defense mechanisms, provides a function whereby a person can protect the conscious mind from a feeling that is otherwise repulsive.
Projection can also be established as a means of obtaining or justifying certain actions that would normally be found atrocious or heinous. This often means projecting false accusations, information, etc., onto an individual for the sole purpose of maintaining a self-created illusion. One of the many problems with the process whereby 'something dangerous that is felt inside can be moved outside - a process of "projection"' - is that as a result 'the projector may become somewhat depleted and rendered limp in character, as he loses part of his personality'.[8]
Compartmentalization, splitting and projection are ways that the ego continues to pretend that it is completely in control at all times, when in reality human experience is one of shifting instinctual reactivity and emotional motivation in which the "I" is not always complicit. Further, while engaged in projection individuals can be unable to access truthful memories, intentions and experiences, even about their own nature, as is common in deep trauma.[9]
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