Projection - A mental process in counseling

Projection. This is another of the reactions to repressed ideas and feelings, in which painful or unpleasant ideas and feelings are rejected from awareness automatically, but the discomfort arising from their inner “festering” seeks relief by irrational displacement onto some other person or external agency. As previously noted in the discussion of repression we tend to criticize in others the very faults to which we are most prone and most averse to recognizing. In many cases this is an automatic unconscious mental device, and our criticisms do not appear irrational to us. When the victim of our accusations reacts to what he feels a rank and unwarranted injustice we accuse him of hypocrisy or dishonesty and the emotional conflict is away to a vigorous beginning.

Many of our projections are harmless enough, even if not at all helpful to our growth in realistic thinking. We ascribe our failures to such agencies as “bad luck” or “kismet” or to some other invulnerable agency, or to such influences as “the Government,” “The Opposition Party,” “The Church” or to some “Board” or other, which are large and invulnerable enough not to worry about it. But our projections may be more serious for ourselves when we blame “the job” or “the neighborhood” for something we are unable to recognize in ourselves and begin to act on such an irrational assumption by changing the external situation. Then the inner and unfaced difficulty still continues to haunt our minds, and we look for another “scapegoat,” and perhaps go from job to job looking for what cannot be found in that way. Well could Shakespeare observe in “Julius Caesar,” “The fault … is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

In marriage counseling many of the accusations made by either partner toward the other are of this nature, and they may arise from many sources. Apart from the unjust accusation about something of which the accuser is really guilty there may be projections of hatred or other destructive emotion from earlier unsolved relationships with a parent or other significant figure. A wife whose childhood was continually harassed by a drunken father may easily react with bitter accusations when her husband has taken a very moderate and harmless amount of alcohol, and the husband’s indignant response to this “injustice” will make things worse. A husband who has had an irritating and frustrating day at the office, and has been unable to express his feelings about it there for fear of losing his job, may come home and be bitterly cruel to his children who have done nothing to deserve any condemnation. The range and variety of manifestations of projection is infinite.

In some cases the mechanism of projection may have still more serious effects. When the repressed material is particularly painful and persistent, and sometimes when it is only partially repressed, it may appear in a person’s consciousness as a complete distortion of reality, as a delusion or an hallucination. It is important for the counselor to recognize this possibility, but it is not his function to attempt to treat such conditions. Such cases where there is any possibility of this kind of distortion are appropriately referred to a psychiatrist, if possible through the person’s own doctor. The counselor may have an important function in helping the other partner to cope with the difficult and most distressing situation, by recognition that the irrational partner cannot help being so, and by refraining from fruitless argument about the distortions while standing quietly firm on his own autonomy.

Tags: Counseling