Projection happens all the time. It starts with denial, and ends in blame. We take some part of ourselves we don’t like —or are ashamed of, or don’t want to think about, or can’t bring ourselves to deal with— and then we project it out onto another person, where we can see it.
Imagine a movie projector. You would be the projector whirring in that little room at the back, and the other person would be the big screen down in front. You’re creating the image, the image is coming from inside of you, but the other person is the only place where you can actually see that image. Thus we can hate someone else for having whatever quality we’re projecting, while remaining steadfastly in love with ourselves and not having to change a thing personally. {“I don’t have a bad temper. What are you talking about, you asshole? You have a terrible temper!”}
I'm sure you've heard that Denial ain't just a river in Egypt. Well, Projection and Blame ain't just small towns in Texas. We are not talking about a quaint practice only carried out by a few remote primitives somewhere on the other side of the planet. This cycle —denial-projection-blame— is a basic psychological mechanism. It’s a description of what went on at your dinner table last night. It’s a description of what we each do all day long unless we’re making a sincere effort not to do so, and probably a good 78.87% of the time even then. There’s no getting around the fact that human beings are now using their intelligence to project whatever they don’t like about themselves onto other people, rather than using their intelligence to correct whatever it is about themselves they don’t like.
Shoot—we’re taught to project whatever we don’t like about ourselves onto other people. Children hear their parents and teachers and leaders do it every day. Hang out in any schoolyard, anywhere in the world, for one whole recess period, and count how many times one kid blames another kid for what he or she just did. Where do they learn that?
Start looking around for the human shadow. It will not take you long to find it. In history, in current politics, in the news, in the paper, on the web, on television, in your own home, and in your own heart. Nor will it take you long to come to the conclusion that this is not some harmless procedure easily overlooked among friends. This is one of humanity’s biggest problems.
As Robert Bly put it, "Projection of shadow material causes most of the misery, injustice and warfare in the world."
And as Carl Jung wrote, "Learning to integrate shadow material is the single most important task facing mankind, as failure to do so will lead to the extinction of the human race."
Whoa. What? Extinction of the human race? What in hell is he talking about? Why’d he say that? Because we not only project blame individually, we also project blame collectively. Or: Whole Cultures Cast Shadows. A hat that looks really cool in a bar in Wyoming may not look cool at all on Fifth Avenue in New York. There are substantial cultural differences between the Pacific Northwest and the Deep South. Between being German and being Sudanese. Between Chinese and Chilean. We’re not just stuck in ego roles and family roles; we’re also stuck in social-historical-mythological eras and areas. And then, in practice, we refine our differences even further by only hanging out with people inside our era and area who are the most like us. Red State, Blue State.
As history has shown over and over again, if enough people deny and project the same qualities something really nasty occurs: like Inquisitions, or exterminations of native populations, or slavery, or the Third Reich, or Israelis and Palestinians, or Shiites and Sunnis, or genocide, or Corporate America—Where the Rich Get Richer! while the poor get laid off. Massive acts of evil simply could not be perpetrated without massive amounts of denial, projection, and blame.
The human shadow comes in layers, as does the unconscious: there’s a personal layer as well as a collective layer. Thus we each have a personal shadow that can get out of hand —for example, we might make fun of how others look if we feel insecure about our own attractiveness. And then we each participate in a collective shadow that can get out of hand —for example, we might accuse another group of evil if we can’t bear to look at the evil our own group has done.
An excellent example of the latter occurred in US history at the end of WWII. After the saturation bombing of German cities by British and US forces which culminated in a firestorm at Dresden so fierce it literally melted 100,000 people, the USA dropped two atomic bombs on a country that was trying to surrender to the Allied forces. At Hiroshima and Nagasaki 150,000 people were killed instantly, and tens of thousands later died slowly and hideously from radiation poisoning. We’re talking more than 300,000 dead people here, and not soldiers, either—completely innocent civilians who were going about their business in big cities. Gruesome. Way beyond gruesome.
Yet soon after these events, unable and unwilling to comprehend that such colossal evil could be perpetrated by their own country, citizens all over the USA (spurred on by their leaders), began to obsess about how dangerous Russia was, and to build bomb shelters in their backyards. I grew up with one of those bomb shelters in my backyard. {No lie: my Dad had an actual bomb shelter built on our property in Fort Worth, Texas, in the 1950s. At first it was all clean and full of water and canned goods, later it got dirty and full of spider webs and snakes, and then finally, after many years of neglect, my Aunt Eddie planted iris all over it, so it eventually became a little hill of flowers with a hollow core.} I also grew up hearing stories about how brutal the Japanese were in WWII. No one ever mentioned Hiroshima or Nagasaki or Dresden in my family.
In other words, there is a ‘me against you’ aspect to the personal shadow, and there is an ‘us against them’ aspect to the collective shadow. And projected out onto others, both types of shadow material harm—do actual damage to—the targets of their projections. Not just psychic mumbo-jumbo, real harm. “Bombs in the baby carriages,” as Paul Simon said in "Graceland."
Welcome to a Presidential election year! Where all the problems one party hasn't been able to address or fix will be blamed on the other party, while the problems themselves will remain unaddressed.