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| art by Anthony McCall |
It is projecting from your own unconscious an image on someone else, and believing the image is really them. Usually it’s not a pretty image—that’s negative projection. Some projections are positive, in the sense that we project an image that is considered “good”: a heroic or angelic image. But much of the time it’s negative: we project an image of evil, a devil image.
The psychology of this is basically that we project what we don’t want to face about ourselves, or have some need to hide in our own behavior and self-image.
Projection as first defined by Freud and given much more elaboration by Jung is much more complex than this, and in many ways it is both inevitable and an aid to becoming a better person. But it is also very tricky and dangerous, because it can easily obscure reality. My concern here is how it operates in the public realm—in political and public policy judgments, which are based in part on judgments about people, and ultimately what is or isn’t real in the world, such as the reality of the Climate Crisis.
Projection is another expression of the unconscious. It is an expression which bypasses rationality, but which can seem to be rational—that is, we invent reasons for the legitimacy of these powerful feelings. That’s another characteristic of the unconscious: the feelings are very powerful, partly because they exist in that darkness that we don’t (or can’t) consciously acknowledge or examine, and so these repressed feelings explode with enormous force, which feels like certainty.
It is unpleasant at best to face the uglier parts of ourselves. Especially in societies or groups that impose or encourage the idea that people are either completely good or completely bad, to admit there is even something bad hidden in us, might shatter our image of ourselves. We can deny that irrational anger, jealousy, envy, aggression, lust and lust for power exist in us, and then project them onto others.
Projections are extreme. President Obama or President Bush are not just wrong on this or that issue—they are evil, masters of deception and malevolence.
In our society, the people who draw projections most often are public figures: celebrities and authority figures. The President of the United States is always the president of projection. Those who disagree with him see him as an all-powerful dictator, or a weak numbskull, or both. Those who agree with him see him at times as a hero, and at other times as betraying their faith and dashing their hopes when he doesn’t do exactly what they want him to do, or he turns out not to be a perfect hero.
It is more than mere partisanship when everything your political opponents favor, you automatically consider not only wrong but evil. A number of prominent Republicans once acknowledged the reality of the Climate Crisis. The cap and trade idea was originally a Republican solution. Now it is major news when Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman offer some acknowledgement of global heating, though so far they don’t support doing anything meaningful to deal with it.
What is so Democratic about global heating, which is a series of objective and mostly scientific questions and answers? The answer is, intrinsically, nothing. But two things happened: powerful fossil fuel corporations prevailed upon the Bush administration to reverse course on dealing with the Climate Crisis, even though during his campaign, G.W. Bush acknowledged its reality and the need to deal with it. And shortly afterwards, his opponent (and the man who would have been President had all the votes been counted), Al Gore became even more identified with the issue, with his popular movie and book, An Inconvenient Truth. For Republicans, Gore was the target of negative projection, and global heating became yet another political litmus test.
So what was once a somewhat partisan issue but with room for compromise on what actions to take to address the Climate Crisis, became polarized. And what was once generally acknowledged—the existence of global heating—was denied, almost entirely along lines of political party or political ideology.
Along with these shifts, projection really took over. Climate scientists themselves were demonized—they cheated, they were in it for the money. Al Gore was in it for political gain—he lived lavishly while calling for sacrifice from others.
So add projection to denial as powerful phenomena that can be exploited for political and economic gain by corporate interests and ambitious politicians.
But simply naming projection as a factor is not the point. The point is that in the end it is a product of an individual’s psyche, and an individual can do something about it. Political projections become more powerful when they are reinforced by a group, and by constant repetition in the only media ever consulted. But in the end, it resides in the individual.
First of all, we each need to consciously grasp the concept of projection, and how it operates. We need to look at our most extreme, most emotional views and ask ourselves whether reality merits this response, or whether it comes from a projection that needs to be looked at within ourselves. We each need to examine our own political views to see whether our projections are distorting our judgments.
Such projections can be dangerous to us personally as well as in leading us to make bad decisions on public policy. A “conservative” who attacks “liberals” for being “bleeding hearts” might well be destroying his own capacity for compassion. In another way, by projecting negative traits onto others, we don’t deal with them in ourselves, and they can turn into uncontrolled behavior that’s self-destructive and hurts those close to us.
Projection of evil onto adversaries leave us blind to our own contradictions. Right now GOPer governors and legislatures in several states, elected to cut budgets and enact smaller government, are passing laws that result in bigger and more intrusive government, and wind up costing the states more. In the name of liberty they are curtailing liberty. These leaders may well know exactly what they are doing, but projection can blind their supporters to the reality.
Ideology both feeds projection and benefits from it. GOPers persist in claiming that lowering taxes on the rich eventually creates jobs, when there's no evidence it does--especially now, with 9% unemployment exactly ten years after the Bush tax cuts for the superwealthy began. GOPer politicians rail against high taxes so much that their supporters simply don't believe the fact that federal taxes are comparatively low--the lowest since 1950, and that top tax rates (even without the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy) are much lower than they were under Reagan. This can't be true, because they believe the image being projected, both the positive image of their party and the negative image of their opponents.
Projections can easily become group projections, and they can assume particular power when projected onto individuals or groups, and we aren't seeing the reality of what's there--we aren't seeing good and bad, we're seeing only very very bad. In further examining projection, next time: the Other.
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