Jung Projection Quotes

The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.

Maybe the only thing each of us can see is our own shadow. Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations. The same way old painters would sit in a tiny dark room and trace the image of what stood outside a tiny window, in the bright sunlight. The camera obscura. Not the exact image, but everything reversed or upside down.

Carl Jung called this his shadow work. He said we never see others. Instead we see only aspects of ourselves that fall over them. Shadows. Projections. Our associations.

Though no one notices at the time, in-loveness obliterates the humanity of the beloved. One does a curious kind of insult to another by falling in love with him, for we are really looking at our own projection of God, not at the other person. If two people are in love, they tread on star dust for a time and live happily ever after—that is so long as this experience of divinity has obliterated time for them. Only when they come down to earth do they have to look at each other realistically and only then does the possibility of mature love exist. If one person is in love and the other not, the cooler one is likely to say, "We would have something better between us if you would look at me rather than at your image of me.

...the mind that is collectively orientated is quite incapable of thinking and feeling in any other way than by projection.

The shadow can be realized only through a relation to a partner, and anima and animus only through a relation to a partner of the opposite sex, because only in such a relation do their projections become operative.

How many of those who are insecure seek power over others as a compensation for inadequacy and wind up bringing consequences down upon their heads and those around them? How many hide out in their lives, resist the summons to show up, or live fugitive lives, jealous, projecting onto others, and then wonder why nothing ever really feels quite right. How many proffer compliance with the other, buying peace at the price of soul, and wind up with neither?

Nietzsche is a marvelous antidote to all fundamentally anti-Biblical efforts to turn mythology into a kind of Bible, and that is the project of the Jungians of this world, or to boil the Bible down to myth, and that is the project of more or less everyone else

The real mystery does not behave mysteriously or secretively; it speaks a secret language, it adumbrates itself by a variety of images which all indicate its true nature. I am not speaking of a secret personally guarded by someone, with a content known to its possessor, but of a mystery, a matter or circumstance which is “secret,” i.e., known only through vague hints but essentially unknown. The real nature of matter was unknown to the alchemist: he knew it only in hints. In seeking to explore it he projected the unconscious into the darkness of matter in order to illuminate it. In order to explain the mystery of matter he projected yet another mystery - his own psychic background -into what was to be explained: Obscurum per obscurius, ignotum per ignotius! This procedure was not, of course, intentional; it was an involuntary occurrence.

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

In general, emotional ties are very important to human beings. But they still contain projections, and it is essential to withdraw these projections in order to attain to oneself and to objectivity. Emotional relationships are relationships of desire, tainted by coercion and constraint; something is expected from the other person, and that makes him and ourselves unfree. Objective cognition lies hidden behind the attraction of the emotional relationship; it seems to be the central secret. Only through objective cognition is the real coniunctio possible.

Obviously, the problem of the shadow plays a great role in all political conflicts. If the man who had this dream had not been sensible about his shadow problem, he could easily have identified the desperate Frenchman with the "dangerous Communists" of outer life, or the official plus the prosperous man with the "grasping capitalists." In this way he would have avoided seeing that he had within him such warring elements. If people observe their own unconscious tendencies in other people, this is called a "projection." Political agitation in all countries is full of such projections, just as much as the backyard gossip of little groups and individuals. Projections of all kinds obscure our view of our fellow men, spoiling its objectivity, and thus spoiling all possibility of genuine human relationships.

White men project onto the Negro the primitive drives, the archaic powers, the uncontrolled instincts that they do not want to admit in themselves, of which they are unconscious, and that they therefore designate as the corresponding qualities of other people.

The starry vault of heaven is in truth the open book of cosmic projection, in which are reflected the mythologems, i.e., the archetypes. In this vision astrology and alchemy, the two classical functionaries of the psychology of the collective unconscious, join hands.

Women who are of “fairy-like” character especially attract such anima projections, because men can attribute almost anything to a creature who is so fascinatingly vague, and can thus proceed to weave fantasies around her.

Since nobody is capable of recognizing just where and how much he himself is possessed and unconscious, he simply projects his own condition upon his neighbour, and thus it becomes a sacred duty to have the biggest guns and the most poisonous gas. The worst of it is that he is quite right. All one’s neighbours are in the grip of some uncontrolled and uncontrollable fear, just like oneself.

To Western man, the meaninglessness of a merely static universe is unbearable. He must assume that it has meaning. The Oriental does not need to make this assumption; rather, he himself embodies it. Whereas the Occidental feels the need to complete the meaning of the world, the Oriental strives for the fulfillment of the meaning in man, stripping the world and existence from himself (Buddha). I would say that both are right. Western man seems predominantly extraverted, Eastern man predominantly introverted. The former projects the meaning and considers that it exists in objects; the latter feels the meaning in himself. But the meaning is both within and without.

Not that these others are wholly without blame, for even the worst projection is at least hung on a hook, perhaps a very small one, but still a hook offered by the other person.

Projection is one of the commonest psychic phenomena…Everything that is unconscious in ourselves we discover in our neighbour, and we treat him accordingly.

Psychic projection is one of the commonest facts of psychology. It is the same as that participation mystique which Lévy-Brühl remarked as a peculiar trait of primitive man. We merely give it another name, and as a rule deny that we are guilty of it. Everything that is unconscious in ourselves we discover in our neighbour, and we treat him accordingly. We no longer subject him to the test of drinking poison; we do not burn him or put the screws on him; but we injure him by means of moral verdicts pronounced with the deepest conviction. What we combat in him is usually our own inferior side.

Nothing has a more divisive and alienating effect upon society than this moral complacency and lack of responsibility, and nothing promotes understanding and rapprochement more than the mutual withdrawal of projections.

Man in the mass sinks unconsciously to an inferior moral and intellectual level, to that level which is always there, below the threshold of consciousness, ready to break forth as soon as it is activated by the formation of a mass. ... Since nobody is capable of recognizing just where and how much he himself is possessed and unconscious, he simply projects his own condition upon his neighbor, and thus it becomes a sacred duty to have the biggest guns and the most poisonous gas.

Perhaps Jung’s most compelling contribution is the idea of individuation, that is, the lifelong project of becoming more nearly the whole person we were meant to be—what the gods intended, not the parents, or the tribe, or, especially, the easily intimidated or the inflated ego. While revering the mystery of others, our individuation summons each of us to stand in the presence of our own mystery, and become more fully responsible for who we are in this journey we call our life.

The limitations of our views and our knowledge are nowhere more apparent than in psychological discussions, where it is almost impossible for us to project any other picture than the one whose main outlines are already laid down in our own psyche.

All these aspects of the anima have the same tendency that we have observed in the shadow: That is, they can be projected so that they appear to the man to be the qualities of some particular woman. It is the presence of the anima that causes a man to fall suddenly in love when he sees a woman for the first time and knows at once that this is “she.” In this situation, the man feels as if he has known this woman intimately for all time; he falls for her so helplessly that it looks to outsiders like complete madness. Women who are of “fairy-like” character especially attract such anima projections, because men can attribute almost anything to a creature who is so fascinatingly vague, and can thus proceed to weave fantasies around her.

I myself recently dreamed that a UFO came speeding towards me which turned out to be the lens of a magic lantern whose projected image was myself; this suggested to me that I was the figure, himself deep in meditation, who is produced by a meditating yogi.

To put it in modern psychological language, this projection of the hieros gamos signifies the conjunction of conscious and unconscious, the transcendent function characteristic of the individuation process. Integration of the unconscious invariably has a healing effect.

Attempts to influence public opinion by means of newspapers, radio, television, and advertising are based on two factors. On the one hand, they rely on sampling techniques that reveal the trend of “opinion” or “wants”—that is, of collective attitudes. On the other, they express the prejudices, projections, and unconscious complexes (mainly the power complex) of those who manipulate public opinion. But statistics do no justice to the individual. Although the average size of stones in a heap may be five centimeters, one will find very few stones of exactly this size in the heap.

Through shadow projection we are able to turn our enemies into ‘devils’ and convince ourselves that they are not men and women like ‘us’, but monsters unworthy of humane consideration. National leaders can make unscrupulous use of this propensity in order to achieve their own political purposes

The reactivation of original perceptions is, however, only one side of regression. The other side is regression to infantile memories, and though this might equally well be called regression to the original perceptions, it nevertheless deserves special mention because it has an importance of its own. It might even be considered as an “historical” regression. In this sense the dream can, with Freud, be described as a modified memory—modified through being projected into the present. The original scene of the memory is unable to effect its own revival, so has to be content with returning as a dream.

Our dream life allows us to have a look at these subliminal perceptions and shows us that they have an effect upon us. After having an agreeable dream about somebody, even without interpreting the dream, I shall involuntarily look at that person with more interest. The dream image may have deluded me, because of my projections; or it may have given me objective information. To find out which is the correct interpretation requires an honest, attentive attitude and careful thought. But, as is the case with all inner processes, it is ultimately the Self that orders and regulates one's human relationships, so long as the conscious ego takes the trouble to detect the delusive projections and deals with these inside himself instead of outside. It is in this way that spiritually attuned and similarly oriented people find their way to one another, to create a group that cuts across all the usual social and organizational affiliations of people. Such a group is not in conflict with others; it is merely different and independent. The consciously realized process of individuation thus changes a person's relationships. The familiar bonds such as kinship or common interests are replaced by a different type of unity-a bond through the Self.

From a practical angle this factor reveals itself in that an individual who follows his dreams for a considerable time will find that they are often concerned with his relationships with other people. His dreams my warn him against trusting a certain person too much, or he may dream about a favorable and agreeable meeting with someone whom he may previously have never consciously noticed. If a dream does pick up the image of another person for us in some such fashion, there are two possible interpretations. First, the figure may be a projection, which means that the dream-image of this person is a symbol for an inner aspect of the dreamer himself. One dreams, for instance of a dishonest neighbor, but the neighbor is used by the dream as a picture of one's own dishonesty. It is the task of dream interpretation to find out in which special areas one's own dishonesty comes into play. (This is called dream interpretation on the subjective level.)

In Jung's terms-that we noted previously-the work is the artist's own transference projection, and he knows that consciously and critically. Whatever he does he is stuck with himself, can't get securely outside and beyond himself. He is also stuck with the work of art itself. Like any material achievement it is visible, earthly, impermanent. No matter how great it is, it still pales in some ways next to the transcending majesty of nature; and so it is ambiguous, hardly a solid immortality symbol. In his greatest genius man is still mocked. No matter that historically art and psychosis have had such an intimate relationship, that the road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse and often detours or ends there. The artist and the madman are trapped by their own fabrications; they wallow in their own anality, in their protest that they really are something special in creation.

Worship of the anima as an officially recognized figure brings the serious disadvantage that she loses her individual aspects. On the other hand, if she is regarded as an exclusively personal being, there is the danger that, if she is projected into the outer world, it is only there that she can be found. This latter state of affairs can create endless trouble, because man becomes either the victim of his erotic fantasies or compulsively dependent on one actual woman.

It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else. Nothing has a more diverse and alienating effect upon society than this moral complacency and lack of responsibility, and nothing promotes understanding and rapprochement more than the mutual withdrawal of projections.

The outcome of an actual encounter with someone who is a carrier of the anima or animus projection 'frequently gives rise in dreams to the symbol of psychic pregnancy, a symbol that goes back to the primordial image of the hero's birth. The child that is to be born signifies the individuality, which, though present, is not yet conscious.' The real psychic purpose of the conventional man's affair with his very unconventional anima woman is to produce a symbolic child, which represents a union of the opposites in his personality and is therefore a symbol of the self. The meeting with the anima/us represents a connection to the unconscious even deeper than that of the shadow. In the case of the shadow, it is a meeting with the disdained and rejected pieces of the total psyche, the inferior and unwanted qualities. In the meeting with the anima/us, it is a contact with levels of the psyche which has the potential to lead into the deepest and highest (at any rate furthest) reaches that the ego can attain.

Like Gnostics, contemporaries feel alienated from their roots and are seeking to overcome the alienation. They are seeking new outlets for their unconscious. Where Gnostics feel cut off from the outer world, contemporaries feel cut off from the inner one. Contemporaries do not, like Gnostics, project their alienation onto the cosmos; through Jungian psychology they seek to discover their true selves within rather than outside themselves. They alone, then, have the chance fully to overcome their alienation.

When Freud speaks of the "dream-façade", he is really speaking, not of the dream itself, but of its obscurity, and in so doing is projecting upon the dream his own lack of understanding. We say that the dream has a false front only because we fail to see into it. We would do better to say that we are dealing with something like a text that is unintelligible, not because it has a facade, but simply because we cannot read it. We do not have to get behind such a text in the first place, but must learn to read it.

The sacrifice that Tertullian and Origen carried out was drastic—too drastic for our taste—but it was in keeping with the spirit of the age, which was thoroughly concretistic. Because of this spirit the Gnostics took their visions as absolutely real, or at least as relating directly to reality, and for Tertullian the reality of his feeling was objectively valid. The Gnostics projected their subjective inner perception of the change of attitude into a cosmogonic system and believed in the reality of its psychological figures.

And there is an additional disadvantage in projecting our shadow. If we identify our own shadow with, say, the Communists or the capitalists, a part of our own personality remains on the opposing side. The result is that we shall constantly (though involuntarily) do things behind our own backs that support this other side, and thus we shall unwittingly help our enemy. If, on the contrary, we realize the projection and can discuss matters without fear or hostility, dealing with the other person sensibly, then there is a chance of mutual understanding—or at least of a truce.

Attempt to influence public opinion by means of newspapers, radio, television, and advertising are based on two factors. On the one hand, they rely on sampling techniques that reveal the trend of "opinion" or "wants"-that is, of collective attitudes. On the other, they express the prejudices, projections, and unconscious complexes (mainly the power complex) of those who manipulate public opinion. But statistics do no justice to the individual. Although the average size of stones in a heap may be five centimeters, one will find very few stones of exactly this size in the heap.

The projection of the mother-imago upon water endows the latter with a number of numinous or magical qualities peculiar to the mother. A good example of this is the baptismal water symbolism in the Church (pl. XXVII). In dreams and fantasies the sea or a large expanse of water signifies the unconscious. The maternal aspect of water coincides with the nature of the unconscious, because the latter (particularly in men) can be regarded as the mother or matrix of consciousness. Hence the unconscious, when interpreted on the subjective level,22 has the same maternal significance as water.

One of Carl Jung’s notable contributions was to articulate the character of the shadow archetype: it is what the self is and includes, but denies and represses. Though it is repressed, the shadow will be heard and is invariably projected in harmful and perhaps insidious ways. Our mistreatment of animals for food is far and away our greatest cultural shadow. Our collective guilt drives us not only to hide the violence we eat but also to act it out: in our aggressive lifestyle, in movies, books, games, and other media, and in the violence we inflict both directly and indirectly on each other.

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.

The hero as an animus-figure acts vicariously for the conscious individual; that is to say, he does what the subject ought, could, or would like to do, but does not do. All the things that could happen in conscious life, but do not happen, are acted out in the unconscious and consequently appear in projection. Chiwantopel is characterized as the hero who leaves his family and his ancestral home in order to seek his psychic counterpart. He thus represents what in the normal course of events ought to happen. The fact that this appears as a fantasy-figure shows how little the author is doing it herself. What happens in fantasy is therefore compensatory to the situation or attitude of the conscious mind. This is also the rule in dreams.

For Epimetheus, as these verses clearly show, Pandora has the value of a soul-image—she stands for his soul; hence her divine power, her unshakable supremacy. Whenever such attributes are conferred upon a personality, we may conclude with certainty that such a personality is a symbol-carrier, or an image of projected unconscious contents. For it is the contents of the unconscious that have the supreme power Goethe has described, incomparably characterized in the line: “Make her an offer and she’ll raise your bid.” In this line the peculiar emotional reinforcement of conscious contents by association with analogous contents of the unconscious is caught to perfection. This reinforcement has in it something daemonic and compelling, and thus has a “divine” or “devilish” effect.

What, then, is this projection-making factor? The East calls it the “Spinning Woman”1—Maya, who creates illusion by her dancing. Had we not long since known it from the symbolism of dreams, this hint from the Orient would put us on the right track: the enveloping, embracing, and devouring element points unmistakably to the mother,2 that is, to the son’s relation to the real mother, to her imago, and to the woman who is to become a mother for him. His Eros is passive like a child’s; he hopes to be caught, sucked in, enveloped, and devoured. He seeks, as it were, the protecting, nourishing, charmed circle of the mother, the condition of the infant released from every care, in which the outside world bends over him and even forces happiness upon him. No wonder the real world vanishes from sight!

Obviously, the problem of the shadow plays a great role in all political conflicts. If the man who had this dream had not been sensible about his shadow problem, he could easily have identified the desperate Frenchman with the “dangerous Communists” of outer life, or the official plus the prosperous man with the “grasping capitalists.” In this way he would have avoided seeing that he had within him such warring elements. If people observe their own unconscious tendencies in other people, this is called a “projection.” Political agitation in all countries is full of such projections, just as much as the backyard gossip of little groups and individuals. Projections of all kinds obscure our view of our fellow men, spoiling its objectivity, and thus spoiling all possibility of genuine human relationships.

Perhaps we may call the dream a façade, but we must remember that the fronts of most houses by no means trick or deceive us, but, on the contrary, follow the plan of the building and often betray its inner arrangement. The "manifest" dream-picture is the dream itself, and contains the "latent" meaning. If I find sugar in the urine, it is sugar, and not a façade that conceals albumen. When Freud speaks of the "dream-façade", he is really speaking, not of the dream itself, but of its obscurity, and in so doing is projecting upon the dream his own lack of understanding. We say that the dream has a false front only because we fail to see into it. We would do better to say that we are dealing with something like a text that is unintelligible, not because it has a facade, but simply because we cannot read it. We do not have to get behind such a text in the first place, but must learn to read it.

Yoga introverts the relations to the object. Deprived of energic value, they sink into the unconscious, where, as we have shown, they enter into new relations with other unconscious contents, and then reassociate themselves with the object in new form after the completion of the tapas exercise. The transformation of the relation to the object has given the object a new face. It is as though newly created; hence the cosmogonic myth is an apt symbol for the outcome of the tapas exercise. The trend of Indian religious practice being almost exclusively introverted, the new adaptation to the object has of course little significance; but it still persists in the form of an unconsciously projected, doctrinal cosmogonic myth, though without leading to any practical innovations. In this respect the Indian religious attitude is the diametrical opposite of the Christian, since the Christian principle of love is extraverted and positively demands an object. The Indian principle makes for riches of knowledge, the Christian for fulness of works.

We have already pointed out that the Dioscuri represent a similar idea in somewhat different form: one sun is mortal, the other immortal. As this whole solar mythology is psychology projected into the heavens, the underlying idea could probably be paraphrased thus: just as man consists of a mortal and an immortal part, so the sun is a pair of brothers, one of whom is mortal, the other immortal. Man is mortal, yet there are exceptions who are immortal, or there is something immortal in us. Thus the gods, or figures like Khidr and the Comte de Saint-Germain, are our immortal part which continues intangibly to exist. The sun comparison tells us over and over again that the dynamic of the gods is psychic energy. This is our immortality, the link through which man feels inextinguishably one with the continuity of all life.58 The life of the psyche is the life of mankind. Welling up from the depths of the unconscious, its springs gush forth from the root of the whole human race, since the individual is, biologically speaking, only a twig broken off from the mother and transplanted.

The meaning of this symbolism becomes clear in the light of what we said earlier: the forward-striving libido which rules the conscious mind of the son demands separation from the mother, but his childish longing for her prevents this by setting up a psychic resistance that manifests itself in all kinds of neurotic fears—that is to say, in a general fear of life. The more a person shrinks from adapting himself to reality, the greater becomes the fear which increasingly besets his path at every point. Thus a vicious circle is formed: fear of life and people causes more shrinking back, and this in turn leads to infantilism and finally “into the mother.” The reasons for this are generally projected outside oneself: the fault lies with external circumstances, or else the parents are made responsible. And indeed, it remains to be found out how much the mother is to blame for not letting the son go. The son will naturally try to explain everything by the wrong attitude of the mother, but he would do better to refrain from all such futile attempts to excuse his own ineptitude by laying the blame on his parents.

spite of the suppression of the Gnostic heresy, it [the heresy] continued to flourish throughout the Middle Ages under the guise of alchemy.”30 For Jung, the alchemical process of extracting gold from base metals is a continuation of the Gnostic process of liberating fallen sparks from matter. Both processes are seemingly outward, physical or metaphysical ones which in fact are inner, psychological ones. Both represent a progression from sheer ego consciousness to the ego’s rediscovery of the unconscious and reintegration with it to forge the self. In alchemy the progression is from base metals to the distillation of vapor out of them and the return of that vapor to the metals to form gold. In Gnosticism the progression is from the Gnostic’s sheer bodily existence to the release of the immaterial spark within the Gnostic’s body and the reunion of that spark with the godhead. In both cases the state truly sought lies within human beings—between the ego and the unconscious—rather than outside them—between the vapor and the metals or between the spark and the godhead. The human state is simply projected onto the external world.31

Jung told the Society that apparitions (ghosts) and materializations were “unconscious projections” or, as he spoke of them to Freud, “exteriorisations.” “I have repeatedly observed,” Jung told his audience, “the telepathic effects of unconscious complexes, and also a number of parapsychic phenomena, but in all this I see no proof whatever of the existence of real spirits, and until such proof is forthcoming I must regard this whole territory as an appendix of psychology.” This sounds scientific enough, but a year later20 when Jung was again in England, he encountered a somewhat more real ghost. Jung spent some weekends in a cottage in Aylesbury outside of London rented by Maurice Nicoll, and while there was serenaded by an assortment of eerie sounds—dripping water, knocks, inexplicable rustlings—while an unpleasant smell filled the bedroom. Locals said the place was haunted, and one particularly bad night, Jung opened his eyes to discover an old woman’s head on the pillow next to his; half of her face was missing. Jung leaped out of bed, lit a candle, and waited until morning in an armchair. The house was later torn down. One would think that having already encountered the dead on their return from Jerusalem, Jung wouldn’t be shaken by a fairly standard English ghost, but the experience rattled him.

Christ himself was accused of heresy, and quite justifiably. John the Baptist and his school called Jeshu ben Miriam-the son of Miriam the deceiver, the traitor, because he had betrayed the mysteries; he became an individual, the son of God, and received immediate revelation, and that was an awful sin and the real cause of his death. It is an old Jewish tradition also that he betrayed the mysteries and so had to suffer the death of a traitor. In the literature of the Manichaeans, the disciples of John, there is a text containing a discussion between Christ and John the Baptist upon that question. They both presented very good arguments. Christ's very practical argument was: 'Do I not make the lame walk? Do I not restore sight to the blind?' But John would not hear of that, he said that Christ betrayed the mysteries, he gave them out to the world, and that they would be destroyed by the world. And the world did destroy them. The projection of the Self belonged to the psychology of ancient times, when the chief or the king represented the whole people and had to suffer and to die for the people. Then another old rite played a certain role in the history of Christ; it is to a great extent legend, but legends are so true that they repeat themselves literally in reality, real events are like legends.

The further we go back into history, the more we see personality disappearing beneath the wrappings of collectivity. And if we go right back to primitive psychology, we find absolutely no trace of the concept of an individual. Instead of individuality we find only collective relationship or what Lévy-Bruhl calls participation mystique. The collective attitude hinders the recognition and evaluation of a psychology different from the subject’s, because the mind that is collectively oriented is quite incapable of thinking and feeling in any other way than by projection. What we understand by the concept “individual” is a relatively recent acquisition in the history of the human mind and human culture. It is no wonder, therefore, that the earlier all-powerful collective attitude prevented almost completely an objective psychological evaluation of individual differences, or any scientific objectification of individual psychological processes. It was owing to this very lack of psychological thinking that knowledge became “psychologized,” i.e., filled with projected psychology. We find striking examples of this in man’s first attempts at a philosophical explanation of the cosmos. The development of individuality, with the consequent psychological differentiation of man, goes hand in hand with the de-psychologizing work of objective science.

When speaking earlier of an assignment of value to the symbol, I showed the practical advantages of an appreciation of the unconscious. We exclude an unconscious disturbance of the conscious functions when we take the unconscious into our calculations from the start by paying attention to the symbol. It is well known that the unconscious, when not realized, is ever at work casting a false glamour over everything, a false appearance: it appears to us always on objects, because everything unconscious is projected. Hence, when we can apprehend the unconscious as such, we strip away the false appearance from objects, and this can only promote truth. Schiller says: Man exercises this human right to sovereignty in the art of appearance, and the more strictly he here distinguishes between mine and thine, the more carefully he separates form from being, and the more independence he learns to give to this form, the more he will not merely extend the realm of Beauty but even secure the boundaries of Truth; for he cannot cleanse appearance from reality without at the same time liberating reality from appearance.112 To strive after absolute appearance demands greater capacity for abstraction, more freedom of heart, more vigour of will than man needs if he confines himself to reality, and he must already have put this behind him if he wishes to arrive at appearance.113

From these definitions the dependence of the naïve poet on the object is especially clear. His relation to the object has a compelling character, because he introjects the object—that is, he unconsciously identifies with it or has, as it were, an a priori identity with it. Lévy-Bruhl describes this relation to the object as participation mystique. This identity always derives from an analogy between the object and an unconscious content. One could also say that the identity comes about through the projection of an unconscious association by analogy with the object. An identity of this kind has a compelling character too, because it expresses a certain quantity of libido which, like all libido operating from the unconscious, is not at the disposal of consciousness and thus exercises a compulsion on its contents. The attitude of the naïve poet is, therefore, in a high degree conditioned by the object; the object operates independently in him, as it were; it fulfils itself in him because he himself is identical with it. He lends his expressive function to the object and represents it in a certain way, not in the least actively or intentionally, but because it represents itself that way in him. He is himself Nature: Nature creates in him the product. He “allows Nature unlimited sway in him.” Supremacy is given to the object. To this extent the naïve attitude is extraverted.

So far we can easily follow this primitive idea. The difficulty arises when we try to carry its implications further, for they reverse the process of psychic projection of which I have spoken. These implications are as follows: it is not my imagination or my awe that makes a sorcerer of the medicine-man; on the contrary, he is a sorcerer and projects his magical powers upon me. Ghosts are not hallucinations of my mind, but appear to me of their own volition. Although such statements are logical derivatives of the mana idea, we hesitate to accept them and begin to look around us for our comfortable theory of psychic projection. The question is nothing less than this: does the psychic in general—that is, the spirit, or the unconscious—arise in us; or is the psyche, in the early stages of consciousness, actually outside us in the form of arbitrary powers with intentions of their own, and does it gradually come to take its place within us in the course of psychic development? Were the dissociated psychic contents—to use our modern terms—ever parts of the psyches of individuals, or were they rather from the beginning psychic entities existing in themselves according to the primitive view as ghosts, ancestral spirits and the like? Were they only by degrees embodied by man in the course of development, so that they gradually constituted in him that world which we now call the psyche?

It is difficult to be a saint, because even a patient and long-suffering nature will not readily endure such a high degree of differentiation and defends itself in its own way. The constant companion of sanctity is temptation, without which no true saint can live. We know that these temptations can pass off unconsciously, so that only their equivalents reach consciousness in the form of symptoms. We know, too, that Herz traditionally rhymes with Schmerz.38 It is a well-known fact that hysterics substitute a physical pain for a psychic pain which is not felt because repressed. Catherina Emmerich’s biographer has understood this more or less correctly, but her own interpretation of the pain is based, as usual, on a projection: it is always the others who secretly say all sorts of wicked things about her, and this is the cause of her pains. The facts of the matter are rather different: the renunciation of all life’s joys, this fading before the flower, is always painful, and especially painful are the unfulfilled desires and the attempts of nature to break through the barrier of repression, without which no such differentiation would be possible. The gossip and sarcastic gibes of the sisters very naturally pick on these painful things, so that it must seem to the saint as if her difficulties came from there. She could hardly know that gossip is very apt to take over the role of the unconscious, and, like a skilled adversary, always aims at the chinks in our armour of which we know nothing.

This fear of life is not just an imaginary bogy, but a very real panic, which seems disproportionate only because its real source is unconscious and therefore projected: the young, growing part of the personality, if prevented from living or kept in check, generates fear and changes into fear. The fear seems to come from the mother, but actually it is the deadly fear of the instinctive, unconscious, inner man who is cut off from life by the continual shrinking back from reality. If the mother is felt as the obstacle, she then becomes the vengeful pursuer. Naturally it is not the real mother, although she too may seriously injure her child by the morbid tenderness with which she pursues it into adult life, thus prolonging the infantile attitude beyond the proper time. It is rather the mother-imago that has turned into a lamia.63 (Cf. pls. XXXVIIIa, XLVIII.) The mother-imago, however, represents the unconscious, and it is as much a vital necessity for the unconscious to be joined to the conscious as it is for the latter not to lose contact with the unconscious. Nothing endangers this connection more in a man than a successful life; it makes him forget his dependence on the unconscious. The case of Gilgamesh is instructive in this respect: he was so successful that the gods, the representatives of the unconscious, saw themselves compelled to deliberate how they could best bring about his downfall. Their efforts were unavailing at first, but when the hero had won the herb of immortality (cf. pl. XIX) and was almost at his goal, a serpent stole the elixir of life from him while he slept.

Nobody can become king except the one who is supposed to be king, the one who contains the idea of the Self. That is Christ according to the still generally prevailing Christian idea, and from such a standpoint any attempt at getting at individuation would be heretic, as it has always been; it has always been the party of the left hand and a crime. Christ himself was accused of heresy, and quite justifiably. John the Baptist and his school called Jeshu ben Miriam-the son of Miriam the deceiver, the traitor, because he had betrayed the mysteries; he became an individual, the son of God, and received immediate revelation, and that was an awful sin and the real cause of his death. It is an old Jewish tradition also that he betrayed the mysteries and so had to suffer the death of a traitor. In the literature of the Manichaeans, the disciples of John, there is a text containing a discussion between Christ and John the Baptist upon that question. They both presented very good arguments. Christ's very practical argument was: 'Do I not make the lame walk? Do I not restore sight to the blind?' But John would not hear of that, he said that Christ betrayed the mysteries, he gave them out to the world, and that they would be destroyed by the world. And the world did destroy them. The projection of the Self belonged to the psychology of ancient times, when the chief or the king represented the whole people and had to suffer and to die for the people. Then another old rite played a certain role in the history of Christ; it is to a great extent legend, but legends are so true that they repeat themselves literally in reality, real events are like legends.

In Miss Miller’s fantasy, too, there is an inner necessity that compels it to go on from the horse-sacrifice to the sacrifice of the hero. Whereas the former symbolizes the renunciation of biological drives, the latter has the deeper and ethically more valuable meaning of a human self-sacrifice, a renunciation of egohood. In her case, of course, this is true only in a metaphorical sense, since it is not the author of the story but its hero, Chiwantopel, who offers himself and is voluntarily sacrificed. The morally significant act is delegated to the hero, while Miss Miller only looks on admiringly and applaudingly, without, it seems, realizing that her animus-figure is constrained to do what she herself so signally fails to do. The advance from the animal sacrifice to the human sacrifice is therefore only an idea, and when Miss Miller plays the part of a pious spectator of this imaginary sacrificial act, her participation is without ethical significance. As is usual in such cases, she is totally unconscious of what it means when the hero, the vehicle of the vitally important magical action, perishes. When that happens, the projection falls away and the threatening sacrificial act recoils upon the subject herself, that is, upon the personal ego of the dreamer. In what form the drama will then run to an end it is impossible to predict. Nor, in the case of Miss Miller, owing to the lack of material and my ignorance of her personality, did I foresee, or venture to assume, that it would be a psychosis which would form the companion piece to Chiwantopel’s sacrifice. It was, in fact, a κατοχή—a total surrender, not to the positive possibilities of life, but to the nocturnal world of the unconscious, a débâcle similar to the one that overtook her hero.

L'objectivité, vécue dans ce rêve et dans ces visions, relève de l'individuation accomplie. Elle est détachement des jugements de valeur et de ce que nous désignons par attachement affectif. En général, l'homme attribue une grande importance à cet attachement affectif. Or, celui-ci renferme toujours des projections et ce sont celles-ci qu'il s'agit de retirer et de récupérer, pour parvenir à soi-même et à l'objectivité. Les relations affectives sont des relations de désir et d'exigences, alourdies par des contraintes et des servitudes : on attend quelque chose de l'autre, ce par quoi cet autre et soi-même perdent leur liberté. La connaissance objective se situe au-delà des intrications affectives, elle semble être le mystère central. Elle seule rend possible la véritable conjuctio*. * Ces pensée de Jung soulèvent beaucoup de problèmes et il faut éviter les malentendus, surtout de la part des lecteurs jeunes. La vie affective est d'importance ! Le fin du fin de la sagesse n'est pas du tout une manière d'indifférence, indifférence qui, à des phases plus juvéniles de la vie, caractérise au contraire certaines maladies mentales. C'est à force d'indifférence et d'inaffectivité que le malade schizophrène, par exemple, se trouve coupé de la vie et du monde. Ce que Jung veut dire, c'est qu'il s'agit, après avoir vécu les liens affectifs dans leur plénitude, de les laisser évoluer vers une sérénité, voire un détachement. Car les liens affectifs ayant rempli leurs bons offices d'insertion au monde, et ayant fait leurs temps, comportent pour tous les partenaires, par leur maturité même, d'être dépassés. Jung parle ici en tant qu'homme de grand âge, d'expérience, de sagesse humaine, qui, en tant que tel, s'est détaché de ce que l'affectivité comporte nécessairement de subjectif et de contraignant. Sand doute avait-il atteint, lorsqu'il écrivit ces pages, à travers son individuation à ce que nous appelons pour notre compte la "simplicité de retour". (Dr Roland Cahen) p. 467

I once saw a striking contrast in the use made of material in Florence. I saw first in the Boboli gardens the two wonderful figures of the barbarians-you remember perhaps those antique stone statues. They are made of stone, consist of stone, represent the spirit of stone: you feel that stone has had the word! Then I went to the tombs of the Medici and saw what Michelangelo did to stone; there the stone has been brought to a super-life. It makes gestures which stone never would make; it is hysterical and exaggerated. The difference was amazing. Or go further to a man like Houdon and you see that the stone becomes absolutely acrobatic. There is the same difference between the Norman and Gothic styles. In the Gothic frame of mind stone behaves like a plant, not like a normal stone, while the Norman style is completely suggested by the stone. The stone speaks. Also an antique Egyptian temple is a most marvelous example of what stone can say; the Greek temple already plays tricks with stone, but the Egyptian temple is made of stone. It grows out of stone — the temple of Abu Simbel, for example, is amazing in that respect. Then in those cave temples in India one sees again the thing man brings into stone. He takes it into his hands and makes it jump, fills it with an uncanny sort of life which destroys the peculiar spirit of the stone. And in my opinion it is always to the detriment of art when matter has no say in the game of the artist. The quality of the matter is exceedingly important — it is all-important. For instance, I think it makes a tremendous difference whether one paints with chemical colors or with so-called natural colors. All that fuss medieval painters made about the preparation of their backgrounds or the making and mixing of their colors had a great advantage. No modern artist has ever brought out anything like the colors which those old masters produced. If one studies an old picture, one feels directly that the color speaks, the color has its own life, but with a modern artist it is most questionable whether the color has a life of its own. It is all made by man, made in Germany or anywhere else, and one feels it. So the projection into matter is not only a very important but an indispensable quality of art. Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 948-949)

Because Prometheus has a one-sided orientation to his soul, all tendencies to adapt to the external world are repressed and sink into the unconscious. Consequently, if perceived at all, they appear as not belonging to his own personality but as projections. There would seem to be a contradiction in the fact that the soul, whose cause Prometheus has espoused and whom he has, as it were, fully assimilated into consciousness, appears at the same time as a projection. But since the soul, like the persona, is a function of relationship, it must consist in a certain sense of two parts—one part belonging to the individual, and the other adhering to the object of relationship, in this case the unconscious. Unless one frankly subscribes to von Hartmann’s philosophy, one is generally inclined to grant the unconscious only a conditional existence as a psychological factor. On epistemological grounds, we are at present quite unable to make any valid statement about the objective reality of the complex psychological phenomenon we call the unconscious, just as we are in no position to say anything valid about the essential nature of real things, for this lies beyond our psychological ken. On the grounds of practical experience, however, I must point out that, in relation to the activity of consciousness, the contents of the unconscious lay the same claim to reality on account of their obstinate persistence as do the real things of the external world, even though this claim must appear very improbable to a mind that is “outer-directed.” It must not be forgotten that there have always been many people for whom the contents of the unconscious possessed a greater reality than the things of the outside world. The history of human thought bears witness to both realities. A more searching investigation of the human psyche shows beyond question that there is in general an equally strong influence from both sides on the activity of consciousness, so that, psychologically, we have a right on purely empirical grounds to treat the contents of the unconscious as just as real as the things of the outside world, even though these two realities are mutually contradictory and appear to be entirely different in their natures. But to subordinate one reality to the other would be an altogether unjustifiable presumption. Theosophy and spiritualism are just as violent in their encroachments on other spheres as materialism. We have to accommodate ourselves to our psychological capacities, and be content with that.

What, actually, does it mean to be a tragic figure firmly in the grip of one's daimon? It means to possess great talent, to relentlessly pursue the expression of that talent through the unswerving affirmation of the causa-sui project that alone gives it birth and form. One is consumed by what he must do to express his gift. The passion of his character becomes inseparable from his dogma. Jung says the same thing beautifully when he concludes that Freud "must himself be so profoundly affected by the power of Eros that he actually wished to elevate it into a dogma...like a religious numen." Eros is precisely the natural energy of the child's organism that will not let him rest, that keeps propelling him forward in a driven way while he fashions the lie of his character-which ironically permits that very drivenness to continue, but now under the illusion of self-control.

From the beginning of time, humans have dealt with what Carl Jung called their shadow side—feelings of inferiority, self-hate, guilt, hostility—by projecting it onto an enemy. It has remained for Becker to make crystal clear the way in which warfare is a social ritual for purification of the world in which the enemy is assigned the role of being dirty, dangerous, and atheistic. Dachau, Capetown and Mi Lai, Bosnia, Rwanda, give grim testimony to the universal need for a scapegoat—a Jew, a nigger, a dirty communist, a Muslim, a Tutsi. Warfare is a death potlatch in which we sacrifice our brave boys to destroy the cowardly enemies of righteousness. And, the more blood the better, because the bigger the body-count the greater the sacrifice for the sacred cause, the side of destiny, the divine plan.

There are many follies now popular which derive from the doctrine of Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961). One of the most insidious is the New Age tactic of jettisoning any onus for honest analysis of setbacks in purported spiritual or therapeutic communities. 'We deny the existence of our shadow and project it onto others.' Thus the critic is evil; the criminal goes free, especially if he happens to be an alternative therapist.

It is quite obvious from dreams that when one faces a shadow which one has denied or run from it diminishes in power, and size, and ultimately becomes a positive force. Our Friends show us what we can do, our enemies teach us what we must do. (Goethe) The first view of any monster is apt to be the most unnerving. When we finally bring ourselves to see the shadow we project as our own, we are literally appalled and overwhelmed by the shadow, the evil out there so plain to see. At the moment of taking it back within ourselves we are apt to be filled with self-recrimination, guilt, and depression. Little wonder we want to leave it out there hanging on someone or something or some other whatever. We perceive the shadow as if it belongs to the other. We withdraw our projection and our own shadow becomes enormous. After prolonged negotiation we are able to befriend the shadow. But even then it is not over because the shadow will always be there, always be a part of our psyche. We had best make a truce with it, for the shadow alerts us to particular kinds of danger or evil.

[Dick] had absorbed Hume's argument that we cannot verify causality (that B follows A does not prove that A caused B), Bishop Berkeley's demonstration that physical reality cannot be objectively established (all we have are sensory impressions that seem to be real), and Kant's distinction between noumena (unknowable ultimate reality) and phenomena (a priori categories, such as space and time, imposed upon reality by the workings of the human brain). From Jung he adopted the theory of projection: The contents of our psyches strongly color our perceptions. As a coup de grace, Phil's study of Vedic and Buddhist philosophy led to a fascination with maya: True reality is veiled from unenlightened human consciousness. We create illustory realms in accordance with our fears and desires.

Shuja ud-Daula, son of the great Mughal Vizier Safdar Jung and his successor as Nawab of Avadh, was a giant of a man. Nearly seven feet tall, with oiled moustaches that projected from his face like a pair of outstretched eagle’s wings, he was a man of immense physical strength.

To cultivate a great character, we must be one of the few who heals the internal division that arises from too strong an identification with our social role. We need to accept that our persona represents only part of our total character and it must become our imperative duty to strip away our social mask and to learn what lies beneath. To achieve this task Jung suggests that we start by adopting a more collective view of who we are. Our gaze should turn outward and we should observe and take note of the character traits of those around us. This advice may seem paradoxical, as our persona is formed primarily through the observation and imitation of other people. But the point of this exercise is to learn about what resides behind the masks of our peers and to expose ourselves to the elements that occupy their unconscious. For it is far easier to look beyond the persona of another person, to notice the discrepancies in their behaviour, the cracks in their armour, so to speak, than it is to recognize these same elements within ourselves. Furthermore, due to the tendency to project unconscious traits of our character on to those around us this exercise will also bring us into contact with these projected elements.

As we integrate more elements of our character into the light of consciousness we will be moving toward the ideal of psychological wholeness, and wholeness according to Jung, is the defining mark of a great character and the means to ever more control of our destiny. For each time we accept a weakness, rather than denying it, we gain some influence over it and we can learn to minimize its effects on us. Each time we discover a new strength of our character, a new set of possibilities opens up before us and our life will be all the better for it. For these reasons there is no task we can set before ourselves, no life project we can adopt, that is more rewarding than the cultivation of a great character. And unlike other life projects, which often require the cooperation of external factors, be it money or other people, this project requires no such things. We can undertake this project at any moment we choose and given the brevity and uncertain nature of existence, now is always the best moment to begin on the life altering journey of discovering more fully who we are.

Far too many people, however, set themselves up for defeat as they are unwilling to acknowledge the destructive side of their being. Utilizing various psychological defense mechanisms such people do their best to stay ignorant to their faults and weaknesses. In so doing these elements of their personality are relegated to their unconscious and make up the realm of the psyche Jung called the shadow. The shadow exerts an active influence on our personality and affects our behavior in a myriad of unforeseen ways. When we behave in a manner which is a product of our shadow, perhaps we treat someone poorly or take part in a self-destructive behavior, rather than taking responsibility for such actions, most people make use of the psychological phenomenon known as projection in order to avoid facing up to their shadow.

Jung, however, stressed that projection was both an inevitable and necessary component in our psychological development as it is one of the primary means by which we can gain an awareness of elements residing in our unconscious. After projecting an element of our unconscious, the healthy thing to do is to recognize the subjective origin of the projection, to withdraw it from the external world, and to integrate this element of our personality into conscious awareness. Only by withdrawing our projections and becoming aware of the faults we previously projected onto others, can we ever hope to take corrective measures. This process of withdrawal and integration is a difficult task for it takes courage to face up to one’s weaknesses and dark qualities. But while difficult, this task is crucial in the battle of life, for failure to confront one’s shadow leaves these elements free to grow in scope and influence.

To defend ourselves from this threat, and to sustain our peace of mind, we make use of a variety of ego-defence mechanisms, particularly repression, denial, and projection. Not only do we repress the shadow in the personal unconscious, but we deny its existence in ourselves, and project it out on to others. This is done quite unconsciously: we are not aware that we do it. It is an act of ego-preservation which enables us to deny our own ‘badness’ and to attribute it to others, whom we then hold responsible for it. It explains the ubiquitous practice of scapegoating and underlies all kinds of prejudice against people belonging to identifiable groups other than our own. Shadow projection is also involved in the psychiatric symptom of paranoia, when one’s own hostile, persecutory feelings are disowned and projected on to others, who are then experienced as being hostile and persecutory towards oneself.

Unscrupulous leaders can manipulate this mechanism in whole populations. Adolf Hitler, for example, repeatedly described the Jews as Untermenschen (subhumans) and through the skilful use of propaganda was able to induce enough Germans to project their shadow on to them as to make the Holocaust possible. The

By projecting his psyche into the stone he gave the stone life, identity, consciousness, doing what the alchemists did as they gazed into the prima materia in their retorts. He came to see the imagination as the psychic quicksilver out of which everything of value is created; for the material world of objects is devoid of all meaning save that which we grant it in the psyche.

Frequently an unconscious component can externalize and appear from without, and is known as projection. This involves an excessive emotional response to another person or situation, like falling in love or disliking someone intensely. Such powerful emotional responses may indicate that an unconscious content is seeking to burst through into consciousness, but it can only appear as externalized, or projected onto the other person. It is not the other person we love or hate, but part of ourselves projected onto him or her.

Carl Jung said, “He seemed he might be the double of a real person. The man Hitler might be hiding within.” (The “double” Jung referred to is translated doppelgänger. The doppelgänger is an occult concept, describing a supposed “ghostly exact double” of a flesh and blood person. Gary North in his book Unholy Spirits explains the doppelgänger as an expression of the primitive belief in a physical duality existing in each man. The second being is the basis of the experience of astral projection.)

the recognition of our shadow. ‘The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.

A symbol is the best possible expression for something essentially unknown. Behind its objective, visible meaning there is an invisible, more profound meaning. The symbol is thus a "nucleus of meaning" and is charged with energy. As a psychic product, a symbol carries similar energized contents across boundaries of time and space. Charged with internal psychic energy, it is projected onto the external world where it finds its reflection in a living form; it may even be projected into an abstract form such as an ideal, something suprahuman, as was the goddess. When we are in love we do feel radiant and beautiful, and we love to laugh. When the archetype breaks through to consciousness, a characteristic numinous effect is experienced. It is awe­inspiring, bigger than life, and, writes Jung, "may be said in the long run to mould the destinies of individuals by unconsciously influencing their thinking, feeling, and behaviour, even if this influence is not recognized until long afterwards.

In Jung’s view, the collective could never be entirely disentangled from the individual in psychology. He described his method as “a purely experiential process in which hit and miss, interpretation and error, theory and speculation, doctor and patient, form a symptosis ... and at the same time are symptoms of a certain process” (1954/1969, ¶ 421). In other words, Jung made a realization about psychology that paralleled what his contemporaries in quantum physics were discovering about subatomic phenomena: that the observers are participants in the process being observed and cannot be removed from it.

He believed that ostracizing any aspect of the human experience, however ugly, created a "shadow" of our rejected bits that we drag behind us. If we do not see that the shadow belongs to us, we project it onto others, both individually and as a culture. To face and own what most disturbs you about yourself, Jung believed, is among the central moral tasks of being human.

As with Jekyll and Hyde, the shadow is our inner hostile sibling and represents what we are missing, and in that way it naturally affects our relationship to our own gender. What we admire or dislike in other men or women often reflects our own hidden face. That rejected part of ourselves is most often first encountered through projecting it onto others.

What people really seek, even if they project it sometimes onto outer objects, is the feeling of being alive.

Most people feel no particular need to make these shadow projections conscious, although by refusing to do so they place themselves in an extremely precarious state. If this is true for the individual as microcosm, it is surely true for the nation as macrocosm. " The psychology of war has clearly brought this condition to light: everything which are own nation does is good, everything which the other nations do is wicked. The center of all that is mean and vile is always to be found several miles behind the enemy's lines." This statement written by Jung in 1928 is as applicable today as it was when it was written. How tragically we watch as the inhumanities of war perpetrated by our own side are justified as being in the long run for the common good, while those of the enemy become a justification for the continuations of our own immorality. It is only when our own youth return from the war zones, wounded and drug-ridden and sick in their souls that those who stay at home and watch the war from a lounge chair propped up before a television set begin to get the message.

Carl Jung believed that the majority of our problems are caused by being unaware of our psychological projections. Projection has been described as ‘a psychological defence mechanism in which we unconsciously project our own unacceptable qualities onto others.’ But how does it work? By not knowing that we’re projecting our blame onto others we needlessly create suffering for both them and us.

Writing in 1964, C. G. Jung accurately observed: Modern man does not understand how much his “rationalism” (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the mercy of the psychic “underworld.” He has freed himself from “superstition” (or so he believes), but in the process he has lost his spiritual values to a positively dangerous degree. His moral and spiritual tradition has disintegrated, and he is now paying the price for this breakup in worldwide disorientation and dissociation.3 Once we accept that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds, we can perhaps also see that we are coresponsible for our present situation. As Jung observed, we must see the shadow in our own psyche if we want to perceive reality clearly or, as the Buddhists put it, “see things as they really are.” We cannot become whole without this work on our shadow, the swampland consisting of all those aspects of our personality that we prefer to deny and instead project onto others: egotism, fantasy, greed, cowardice, laziness, irrationality, fanaticism, etc. To put it starkly: In order to become whole, we must discover the potential of terrorism in the complex circuitry of our own psyche. Terrorism is an expression of spiritual deafness, moral blindness, and irrational anger. Only when we can acknowledge the presence of these dark forces within us can we take responsibility for them. This brings me back to the mental discipline of Karma-Yoga by which action is transformed in such a way that it is not rooted in the shadow and therefore is not karmically tainted. Morally and spiritually sound action must be accompanied by self-observation, self-understanding, self-acceptance, self-transformation, and self-transcendence. Without these disciplines, we are likely to succumb to projection and wrong action (vikarma). These, in turn, are not conducive to inner and outer peace. On the contrary, if our behavior fails to be anchored in sound spiritual virtues and practices, it will predictably cause disturbance, disharmony, harm, hurt, and even chaos in the world. Krishna taught that there are circumstances when it is not only appropriate but essential to take a firm stand against evil. He was not a romantic pacifist who, in the interest of an abstract principle (however noble), allows evil to conquer good. When the moral or spiritual order is at stake, we must actively oppose the forces that seek to undermine it. He even condoned war to accomplish this end, though a war not tinged with hatred and conducted for selfish reasons.

To know, and only at a glance, that a teenage girl would become his wife would have to be close to 100 percent anima projection!

Western society, detached from its Judeo-Christian roots, was compulsively materialistic, spiritually impoverished, and technologically obsessed. Collectively we were perpetuating the mistake of the alchemists, projecting our spiritual aspirations into material things in the delusion that we were pursuing the highest value. This had encouraged us to treat each other as economic commodities and exploit the physical resources of the planet while neglecting, to our own detriment, the spiritual resources of the Self. The only remedy for our civilization’s ‘loss of soul’ was a massive reinvestment in the inner life of the individual, so as to re-establish a personal connection with ‘the mythic world in which we were once at home by right of birth’ (MDR 237). Deprived of the symbolism of myth and religion, people were cut off from meaning, and society was doomed to die.