Carl Jung and the withdrawal of Projections
If you imagine someone who is brave enough to withdraw all his projections, then you get an individual who is conscious of a pretty thick shadow.
Such a man has saddled himself with new problems and conflicts.
He has become a serious problem to himself, as he is now unable to say that they do this or that, they are wrong, and they must be fought against.
He lives in the “House of the Gathering.”
Such a man knows that whatever is wrong in the world is in himself, and if he only learns to deal with his own shadow he has done something real for the world. He has succeeded in shouldering at least an infinitesimal part of the gigantic, unsolved social problems of our day. – Carl Jung
Carl Jung talks about projection
Jung Currents on Projection
Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naïvely suppose that people are as we imagine them to be. . .
All the contents of our unconscious are constantly being projected into our surroundings, and it is only by recognizing certain properties of the objects as projections or imagos that we are able to distinguish them from the real properties of the objects. . .
Cum grano salis, we always see our own unavowed mistakes in our opponent.
Excellent examples of this are to be found in all personal quarrels.
Unless we are possessed of an unusual degree of self-awareness we shall never see through our project!ons but must always succumb to them, because the mind in its natural state presupposes the existence of such projections.
It is the natural and given thing for unconscious contents to be projected. ~Carl Jung, CW 8, Para 507
Carl Jung on the effect of Projection
The effect of projection is to isolate the subject from his environment, since instead of a real relation to it there is now only an illusory one. Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face. In the last analysis, therefore, they lead to an autoerotic or autistic condition in which one dreams a world whose reality remains forever unattainable
The resultant sentiment d’incomplétude and the still worse feeling of sterility are in their turn explained by projection as the malevolence of the environment, and by means of this vicious circle the isolation is intensified.
The more projections are thrust in between the subject and the environment, the harder it is for the ego to see through its illusions.
A forty-five-year-old patient who had suffered from a compulsion neurosis since he was twenty and had become completely cut off from the world once said to me: “But I can never admit to myself that I’ve wasted the best twenty-five years of my life!”
It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously, of course for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance.
Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Para 17-18
The conscious projection at which Christian education aims therefore brings a double psychic benefit: firstly, one keeps oneself conscious of the conflict (“sin”) of two mutually opposing tendencies, thus preventing a known suffering from turning into an unknown one, which is far more tormenting, by being repressed and forgotten; and secondly, one lightens one’s burden by surrendering it to God, to whom all solutions are known ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 95
