Projection (psychology)

“ The process of representing is a function of the subject, but the fact represented is projected as it were into the objective world, where experience has taught us to expect it. And the practice of projection grows so naturally by inherited adaptation and repeated experience that the thing represented appears to us to be external. We no longer feel a sensation as a state of consciousness but conceive it as an independent reality. ”

“ What you project you disown, and therefore do not believe is yours. You are excluding yourself by the very judgment that you are different from the one on whom you project. Since you have also judged against what you project, you continue to attack it because you continue to keep it separated. By doing this unconsciously, you try to keep the fact that you attacked yourself out of awareness, and thus imagine that you have made yourself safe.
Yet projection will always hurt you. ”

“ We think the thing now in one context, now in another; now in a definite image, now in a symbol. Sometimes our sense of its identity pertains to the mere fringe, sometimes it involves the nucleus, of our thought. We never can break the thought asunder and tell just which one of its bits is the part that lets us know which subject is referred to; but nevertheless we always do know which of all possible subjects we have in mind. Introspective psychology must here throw up the sponge; the fluctuations of subjective life are too exquisite to be arrested by its coarse means. ”

“ But what the ordinary psychologies call 'ideas' are nothing but parts of the total object of representation. All that is before the mind at once, no matter how complex a system of things and relations it may be, is one object for the thought. Thus, 'A-and-B-and-their-mutual-incompatibility-and-the-fact-that-only-one-can-be-true-or-can-become-real-notwithstanding-the-probability-or-desirability-of-both' may be such a complex object ”

“ In the foregoing case the mechanism of projection is used to settle an emotional conflict; it serves the same purpose in a large number of psychic situations which lead to neuroses. But projection is not specially created for the purpose of defence, it also comes into being where there are no conflicts. The projection of inner perceptions to the outside is a primitive mechanism which, for instance, also influences our sense-perceptions, so that it normally has the greatest share in shaping our outer world. ”

“ Under this head come all those phenomena to which science denies an objective value: illusions of the senses, mental hallucinations, and the normal non-scientific representations of things, the creations of the imagination in music and in art, the entire subjective life of feeling and of aspiration, regarded only as a particularly characteristic association of representation, irrespective of all objective truth, which lies beyond the limits of psychology as such. ”

“ There are no bare sensations which are first experienced and then ‘projected’ into our feet as their feelings, or onto the opposite wall as its colour. The projection is an integral part of the situation, quite as original as the sense-data. ”

“ But if we would approach to an understanding of psychological things we must remember the fact of the subjective conditioning of all knowledge. The world is as we see it and not simply objective; this holds true even more of the mind. Of course it is possible to look at the mind objectively, just as at Faust, or a Gothic Cathedral. In this objective conception there is comprised the whole worth and worthlessness of current experimental psychology and psychoanalysis. The scientific mind, thinking causally, is incapable of understanding what is ahead ”

“ Attention being the condition of analysis, and separate imagination being the condition of attention, it follows also that separate imagination is the condition of analysis. Only such elements as we are acquainted with, and can imagine, separately, can be discriminated within a total [Pg 504] sense-impression. The image seems to welcome its own mate from out of the compound, and to heighten the feeling thereof; whereas it dampens and opposes the feeling of the other constituents; and thus the compound becomes broken for our consciousness into parts. ”

“ But this whole theory is one tissue of false assumptions. Consciousness is in no sense such a bundle of juxtaposed presentations. Presentations are not objects, but events, which come into and pass out of existence, and during their brief life undergo continual changes. The percipient subject, above all, is not an observer, standing opposite its own presentations and passively contemplating them, but an inseparable segment of the network of psychic events themselves.
The objects of psychology are, in short, one and all conscious processes or events. ”

“ Instead of starting from an original pure subjectivity of sensation, and seeking how this could possibly have acquired an objective signification, we must, on the contrary, begin by the possession of objectivity by the sensation and then show how for reflective consciousness the latter becomes interpreted as an effect of the object, how in short the original immediate objectivity becomes changed into a remote one. ”

“ When you have described reasoning as a process of mental exploration, you have told only half the story. The successful reasoner not only seeks, but finds. He not only ransacks his memory for data bearing on his problem, but he finally "sees" the solution clearly. The whole exploratory process culminates in a perceptive reaction. What he "sees" is not presented to his senses at the moment, but he "sees that something must be so". This kind of perception may be called inference. ”

“ The realities, concrete and abstract, physical and ideal, whose permanent existence we believe in, seem to be constantly coming up again before our thought, and lead us, in our carelessness, to suppose that our 'ideas' of them are the same ideas. When we come, some time later, to the chapter on Perception, we shall see how inveterate is our habit of not attending to sensations as subjective facts, but of simply using them as stepping-stones to pass over to the recognition of the realities whose presence they reveal. ”

“ But Mill and the rest believe that a thought must be what it means, and mean what it is, and that if it be a picture of an entire individual, it cannot mean any part of him to the exclusion of the rest. I say nothing here of the preposterously false descriptive psychology involved in the statement that the only things we can mentally picture are [Pg 472] individuals completely determinate in all regards. ”

“ The question as to the existence of any causal relations in the old sense between thought and feeling has already been answered in previous considerations; all we can assert is sequence or simultaneity. Indeed, as psychology has rarely troubled itself with any direct question of this sort, its introduction may appear foolish. Yet feeling is sometimes, by imputation, treated as a mere attribute of thought, while again, as we shall see, it is often considered as an independent, directing, if not perception, at least the subsumption of percepts in thought. ”

“ He uses the tests we all practically use. If the state of mind resembles his own idea of a certain reality; or if without resembling his idea of it, it seems to imply that reality and refer to it by operating upon it through the bodily organs; or even if it resembles and operates on some other reality that implies, and leads up to, and terminates in, the first one,—in either or all of these cases the psychologist admits that the state of mind takes cognizance, directly or remotely, distinctly or vaguely, truly or falsely, of the reality's nature and position in the world. ”

“ But if this be so, it is an utter falsification of the order of nature to speak of sensations grouping themselves into aggregates, and so composing for us the objects of which we think; and the whole language of the theory, in regard to the field of synchronous existences, is a direct inversion of the truth. Experience proceeds and intellect is trained, not by Association, but by Dissociation, not by reduction of pluralities of impression to one, but by the opening out of one into many; and a true psychological history must expound itself in analytic rather than synthetic terms. ”

“ The postulated objective reality acts upon the given individual consciousness and gives rise to mental states which along with the objective representation of that reality has also its own coloring, its own subjective side. ”

“ True enough, we can remove our attention, and keep it removed, from sensations that have no reference to the outer world, those, e.g., of the weaker after-images, and of entoptic objects, etc.... But what would become of our perceptions at all if we had the power not only of ignoring, but of transforming into their opposites, any part of them that differed from that outward experience, the image of which, as that of a present reality, accompanies them in the mind? ”

“ What the thought sees is only its own object; what the psychologist sees is the thought's object, plus the thought itself, plus possibly all the rest of the world. We must be very careful therefore, in discussing a state of mind from the psychologist's point of view, to avoid foisting into its own ken matters that are only there for ours. We must avoid substituting what we know the consciousness is, for what it is a consciousness of, and counting its outward, and so to speak physical, relations with other facts of the world, in among the objects of which we set it down as aware. ”

“ But, as the problem we are about to be engaged with has much in common with these speculations, and as its solution has been retarded by the assumption of various false facts which have invariably been permitted to mingle with them, we must, in a few words, strike at the root of these spurious facts, and, employing a more accurate observation, we will then bring forward, purified from all irrelevant admixture, that great question of psychology—how, or in what circumstances, does Consciousness come into operation? ”

“ We cannot, it is true, give a reason why the line we feel when process (2) awakens should have its own peculiar shape; nor can we explain the essence of the process of discriminative attention. But we can see why, if the brute facts be admitted that a line may have one of its parts singled out by attention at all, and that that part may appear in relation to other parts at all, the relation must be in the line itself,—for the line and the parts are the only things supposed to be in consciousness. ”

“ Each one sees what he expects to see, what appeals to his interests the most intensely. What the unprejudiced observer recognizes as the flimsily disguised form of the medium, the believer transforms into the object of his thoughts and longings. Only let the form be vague enough, the light dim enough, the emotions upon a sufficient strain, and that part of perception in which the external image is deficient will be readily supplied by the subjective tendencies of each individual. ”

“ On the one hand, they advise you to isolate yourself, as far as possible, from every external sensation, especially every intellectual work,—for if you were to busy yourself even with the simplest calculation, what would become of internal observation?—on the other hand, after having with the utmost care attained this state of intellectual slumber, you must begin to contemplate the operations going on in your mind, when nothing there takes place! ”

“ Sense-deceptions, faulty observation, distraction, exaggeration, illusion, fallacy, and error are not idle abstract fancies of the psychologist, but stern realities; and their existence emphasizes the need in the determination of truth and the maintenance of a sound rationality, of a calm, unprejudiced judgment, of an experienced and balanced intelligence, of a discerning sense for nice distinctions, of an appreciation of the circumstances under which it is peculiarly human to err. ”

“ Propositions concerning the different worlds are made from 'different points of view'; and in this more or less chaotic state the consciousness of most thinkers remains to the end. Each world whilst it is attended to is real after its own fashion; only the reality lapses with the attention. ”

“ And further, it is to be suspected that, notwithstanding the clearness and certainty of Proposition II., doubts may still be entertained as to the inviolable unity in cognition of the objective and the subjective parts of our knowledge. Moreover, it may be doubted whether the popular delusion, which is largely shared in by psychology—namely, that subject and object are two units, and not merely one unit or minimum of cognition—is combated and exploded in our second proposition in terms sufficiently express. ”

“ In this case, nobody would pretend that the richer and more elaborate conception which we gain of the puzzle after solving it came directly out of our first crude conception of it, for it is notoriously the outcome of experimenting with our hands. It is true that, as they both mean that same puzzle, our earlier thought and our later thought have one conceptual function, are vehicles of one conception. ”

“ If, on the other hand, the mental state under examination neither resembles nor operates on any of the realities known to the psychologist, he calls it a subjective state pure and simple, possessed of no cognitive worth. ”

“ Similarly, as all intellectual processes grow out of the primary process of perception, it is sometimes convenient to designate these as constituting the perceptive side of mind. From still another point of view the science of psychology may be divided into subjective and objective. Affective phenomena relate exclusively to the subject and yield no notion of the object, while perceptive phenomena have for their primary function to acquaint the subject with the qualities of the object. We thus have the two great fields of subjective and objective psychology. ”