The Hidden Dangers of Projection

How unconscious projections affect your life and how to fix them in 3 parts (+ DOWNLOADABLE SUMMARY 📝)

“Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face”

– C.G Jung, ‘Aion,’ para. 17

Hypnosis (1904) Sascha Schneider

The idea of something “unconscious” affecting your life is (by its nature) hard to grasp.

To all appearances, the world is just there. We often feel more like observers than participants. If someone’s rude, threatening, or furtive, we rarely think ourselves as the course. The problem is, that person’s behaviour isn’t so much a reality, as it is our perception of reality.

We’ve all judged a book by its cover to only discover someone isn’t at all who we thought they were.

We projected our own expectations onto them.

This is the experience of finding out the person you loved isn’t all that; or realising the insufferable neighbour you can’t stand is actually a nice guy. You could go your whole life hating an illusion – people do.

This is just the iceberg.

The reality of projection is more pervasive than you can imagine.

How unconscious projections affect your life and how to fix them in 3 parts…

(See end for downloadable summary 📝)

Part I. How it Works

Carl Jung’s most fundamental theory is the collecting unconscious.

It’s the repository of all ancestral experience. It’s what gives you the instincts to fear heights or spiders, and is also home to the archetypes (impressions in the mind represent core human nature).

In short, the mind is made of many facets trying to coexist.

When an aspect of human nature is neglected, the greater system suffers.

This manifests as depression, neuroticism, nightmares. The psyche is trying to pull your attention to what is missing, in the hope that you can read the signs and make the necessary changes. But this job of becoming conscious of the unconscious takes a lifetime.

Jung called it individuation.

For most of us, it’s only in the second half of life that we’ll make significant progress.

But what about all that energy in the system that needs integrating? The stark reality of life and our place in it that needs accepting? This is obviously too much for a young person to handle. You can’t be expected to forgive transgressions, own your mistakes, keep a cool head when a plan falls apart, or be a paragon of virtue as a teenager.

You don’t possess the level of consciousness necessary.

So we project it.

Onto parents, teachers, peers, lovers, role-models – you name it. We put our ideals into the safe hands of those we deem worthy of it. Projection isn’t evil in itself.

American Jungian analyst, Robert A. Johnson, called this “giving your gold to others.”

The natural course of events should go like this:

You project the psychological gold you’re not ready to carry → This person represents the paradigm of whatever you’re projecting → When you’re mature enough, you take your gold back.

But there are many ways this can go wrong

Part II. The Dangers of Projection

1) Parent-Child Relations