What is projection in psychology: examples and description

Human life consists of joyful and negative moments. If the first bring a feeling of happiness, then the bad moments cause anxiety and make you nervous. Because of this, it is difficult to maintain a normal lifestyle, performance slows down, and physical activity decreases. To cope with bitterness, resentment, disappointment or irritation, people unconsciously close themselves off from problems. Projection in psychology is a psychological defense mechanism that is considered one of the oldest.

Concept and principle of operation

To understand how projection works, you need to imagine the operation of an electronic projector. The principle of its operation is that the broadcast image is transferred to any opposite surface. The same thing happens after a person accumulates negative emotions. She begins to pour them out on those around her.

Difficult experiences include shame and guilt. In order not to feel them, natural defensive reactions of the psyche are triggered. After displaying aggression and hatred towards others, a person does not rid himself of negativity, but passes it on to others. Thanks to this, he does not feel guilty because he believes that others are no better than him.

A defense mechanism, which psychologists call projection, begins to form in any person immediately after birth. It develops under the influence of various prohibitions established by society. During upbringing, ideas about what is good and what is bad are fixed in the mind. At the same time, in the process of growing up, more and more prohibitions appear that are established by society.

The projection mechanism consists of several stages:

1. The subject feels discomfort, irritation, shame. They are associated with wrong thoughts, behavior that is forbidden when viewed from the point of view of social rules.
2. There is a desire to get rid of any negative emotions. A person begins to take unpleasant sensations beyond the boundaries of his consciousness.
3. He begins to transfer his emotions and negativity onto other people in order to get rid of the feeling of shame.

Based on this principle, it can be explained why heavy drinkers blame others for drinking too much. Officials accuse ordinary people of theft to justify their own sins. Husbands who wish to cheat often show outbursts of jealousy towards their wives. There are many such situations, each of them clearly demonstrates the work of projection as a defense of one’s own psyche.

How projection and empathy are related

It is worth noting that in psychology, projection is not always negative emotions. It often goes hand in hand with empathy. By definition, this is a person’s ability to empathize, sympathize, and experience the same feelings and sensations as the interlocutor. This is compassion that is always connected to personal experience. A person understands how his opponent feels in a given situation, because he himself has experienced a similar one. It’s not for nothing that they say that you can understand a person by walking in his shoes.

Kinds

There are different types of projection in psychology:

1. Complementary - manifests itself in the attribution of qualities that are completely opposite to one’s own feelings. For example, this can manifest itself in phrases such as “I am honest, generous, and you are deceitful and greedy.”
2. Attributive - a classic projection, when activated, a person begins to attribute his own sins to other people. So he tries to dump the feeling of guilt on the interlocutor so as not to feel it himself.
3. Autistic - a person projects his own needs into the outside world. Because of this, any poor person will fixate his attention on money, a friend who has experienced betrayal will look for a catch in new acquaintances.
4. Rational - manifests itself when blaming other people after making their own mistakes or showing weakness.

Often different types of projections interact with each other. Typically, such interactions occur with people who are insecure.

What is projection

Projection in psychology is the transference of feelings, thoughts, desires to others. In simple words, when a person feels, for example, guilt or shame, he projects them onto other people. In this way, he relieves himself from worries and protects his psyche from trauma. And it works. Now he blames not himself, but one of his friends, acquaintances, relatives, etc. At the same time, excuses are still made that someone’s behavior is not better, but even worse.

Let's look at what projection is in psychology, using examples from life. Have you ever met outrageously jealous men who, despite their jealousy, do not mind cheating on their companion? They reason something like this: if I have such thoughts, then the woman thinks the same. If you wish, you can even find logic in such reasoning. True, perverted.

Or, for example, a wife who scolds her husband for wasting the family budget. She doesn't like that he spends money on some of his own entertainment. In fact, the woman herself is not very thrifty. She buys more shoes, a dress and much more. But at the same time she continues to call her husband a spender.

The effect of projection can be seen on yourself. How often do you scold your neighbors or colleagues for their negative character traits? Think about it, do you have these qualities? Surely the answer will be negative. However, this is just an illusion.

Advantages and disadvantages

The protective projection has many disadvantages that can be seen with the naked eye:

1. A person hides his negative experiences, emotions, weaknesses under projection, without trying to solve them.
2. When defensive reactions are triggered, reality is distorted. Because of this, a person sees only what he wants and does not notice real events.
3. Interpersonal conflicts often arise due to the fact that problems are shifted to a partner, relatives, or friends.
4. Incorrect assessment of the behavior of others.

Projection advantages:

1. Projection helps to cope with internal conflicts that arise due to negative thoughts and emotions. If you do not cope with internal experiences, psychological illnesses may arise - prolonged depression, psychosis, neuroses. To prevent this, projection comes into play, which protects the human psyche.
2. Projection plays a big role in empathy. This allows mothers to feel how their child feels in those moments when he does not get what he wants. If projection did not exist, the world would become callous and insensitive.

Projection is a method of psychological defense that protects the human psyche from injury.

If you take into account the disadvantages of this phenomenon, you can competently manage protection so as not to expose loved ones to negative feelings.

How to detect projections

Let's do an experiment.

You will need a partner Vasily. I'm sure everyone has Vasily, so I won't tell you where to get it.

In addition to Vasily, you will need two sheets of paper and two pens - a set for each.

The experiment is carried out in complete silence. You and Vasily sit opposite each other, with paper and pens in front of you. Agree who leads first. During the entire experiment, you are both silent and look at each other.

Let the leader be you. You think intensely about something for 2-3 minutes. It could be anything. For example, try to mentally convey some feeling to Vasily. Or imagine that Vasily performs some action. For example, he starts dancing. Mentally broadcast your message. Do not make a stone face, but your facial expressions should remain calm. Maintain eye contact whenever possible.

Vasily’s task is to grasp what you are thinking about and what you are transmitting to him.

At this time, Vasily watches you and catches his feelings. They will be quite thin, so you will have to try. Vasily records his guesses and feelings on paper.

After 2-3 minutes the roles change. Now it's your turn to read minds.

After that, share your guesses with each other - they will almost certainly differ dramatically.

So there you go! What you “considered” from Vasily’s head is actually your own thoughts and feelings! Now you know how projection works in psychology.

At this moment, all the teachers and practitioners of mental hypnosis at a distance are unfollowing me en masse...

How to determine the use of a mechanism?

Examples of the use of projection as a psychological defense mechanism:

1. A young doctor who has little experience begins to worry about his internal problems. These experiences intensify over time and prevent him from sensibly assessing the work situation. For this reason, in the extract about the patient’s psychological state, problems appear that belong to the doctor himself
2. Psychologists conducted a study with a group of people suffering from alcohol addiction who were treated in a treatment center. During the treatment course, psychologists showed them three different paintings by the same artist. The first of them depicted several men sitting at a common table with papers in their hands. The second picture showed the same men, but in frozen poses. The third painting showed stones. Participants in the experiment were asked what they saw in three pictures. Everyone answered that these were images of a drinking party, people from whom got drunk and fell under the table. The personal problem of the experiment participants distorted their view of reality. Because of this, they saw their alcoholism reflected in the pictures shown.

From practical examples it is clear that in addition to protecting the psyche, projection can cause many inconveniences.

Why is this method of protection dangerous?

Consequences of using projection:

1. Distortion of reality.
2. The accumulation of problems that are hidden under the projection leads to the development of difficulties in personal life, work activities, and communication with other people.
3. After an outburst of negative emotions on others, the feeling of guilt intensifies. There comes temporary relief, which is replaced by new experiences.

To protect yourself from possible dangers, you need to learn to understand how projection works in different situations, try to control your actions and statements.

Other methods of protection

In addition to projection, there are several other methods of psychological defense:

1. Denial is a defensive reaction that begins to develop in childhood. Its first manifestations can be noticed when a child breaks a plate, but persistently proves to the mother that it was not he who did it. Denial often occurs in people who do not want to accept a serious diagnosis. Strong psychological pressure from the outside will only strengthen the defense of the psyche, which will lead to a person’s general isolation.
2. Repression is a psychological defense mechanism with the help of which pressing problems are forced out of consciousness into the area of ​​the unconscious, but this does not make the problem disappear. It takes root in the psyche, which is why the general condition does not change for the better.
3. Introjection is a defense mechanism by which a person immerses himself in the world of his authority. At the same time, you can find out which feelings warm him more, what he lacks.
4. Isolation is a mechanism by which a person divides his personality into two parts. He accepts and protects one, denies one and tries to hide it from others.
5. Regression is a psychological defense mechanism, when activated, a person moves to a simplified level of functioning.
6. Fantasy is a defense mechanism by which the subject creates an unreal reality that cannot happen in real life. This helps to cope with the thirst for your own desires.
7. Transferred aggression. It helps not to be offended by your loved one when he, returning from his own affairs in a bad mood, begins to take out aggression on loved ones.
8. Reactive education. It appears in people who do not know how to save money. Moreover, the more difficult it is for them to earn a certain amount, the faster they will spend it.

Another psychological defense mechanism is rationalization. It can be seen in the stories that students or schoolchildren write when they are late for class or fail to complete their homework.

Projection is a psychological defense mechanism that develops in any person from birth. It protects the human psyche from the destructive effects of negative emotions, experiences, and grievances. A defensive reaction distorts reality, which prevents people from assessing the situation sensibly.

The World of Projections - Projection as a Defense Mechanism

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Projection is a protective mechanism of the psyche
In life, quite often we are faced with misunderstandings in relationships, misinterpretation of the meaning of words or actions of partners, and the attribution of alien motives - our own and other people. Sometimes such errors of perception (our own and others) take on the most fantastic shapes and sizes, leading to insoluble misunderstandings, destroying relationships and connections, and interfering with mutual understanding.

All this happens because we live in a world of projections. In psychology, projection is the attribution of one’s own qualities, feelings, and intentions to another person (or object). Those. this is a situation where we perceive the internal as coming from the outside. As a rule, what is attributed to others is what is hidden from oneself, what is impossible to perceive in oneself, and also what is socially unacceptable.

For example, a very self-centered person who suppresses his own feelings and experiences may talk about others like this: “People are very selfish, they don’t care about others, everyone only cares about themselves!”

Freud, describing the projective mechanisms operating in the human psyche, spoke of this as an unconscious process in which what we have rejected in ourselves returns to us from the outside. When projective mechanisms operate, mental content always returns back, but it returns in the form of something extraneous, “not ours,” alien.

In the crudest forms of projection, this literally happens when a person hears voices, sees hallucinations, i.e. a person hears or sees something that is not in reality. In these situations, we talk about a psychotic experience - alienated and projected outward own mental experiences, thoughts, sensory perceptions return as extraneous voices or visions. A person gets rid of some contents of the psyche, but they return to him as alien, alien, and therefore dangerous and unknown, acquiring fantastic images and outlines.

In most cases, the projection does not take such a grandiose character, such strong distorted forms, but nevertheless, in its crude forms, it can greatly distort and refract our understanding, the meaning of the situation, the characteristics of a particular person, the context of the conversation, etc. .

It should be noted that Sigmund Freud spoke about projection in both normal and pathological functioning. Melanie Klein describes projection as a basic defense mechanism of the psyche that begins to function very early, in infancy. The baby's first projections are projections of his own aggression into the image of the mother.

Many people know this concept, the term “projection”, are familiar with it at least superficially, in general terms, but nevertheless cannot stop projecting their own internal events onto other people. Why is this happening? I will say right away that we do not need to strive to get rid of projections, we will not be able to do this. But soften our projections. The question is not that we should stop projecting, because... this is impossible, both in the degree of projections, and also in what to project.

Projections and illusions of perception

What influences our perception of reality? Of course, there are many factors - external and internal. But when dealing with projective mechanisms, we examine precisely the internal aspects of our perception of the world. It is this layer that interests us now.

At the level of the body, the analogue of projection is spitting out, the very possibility of spitting out, i.e. simply get rid of something unpleasant, bringing displeasure. And in a psychic sense, we can also say that projection is a way to get rid of, to say “no” to something scratching us from the inside, which is felt as unacceptable, unwanted, untimely at the moment.

Thus, projection raises for us the problem of boundaries - the boundary between me and others, between me and the world, what belongs to me here, and what belongs to another - mine or not mine. Those. the idea and the associated problems of one’s own and another’s, the discovery of boundaries or their erasure. This is also associated with situations when a person is not able to accept something, deal with something, hence the problems of avoidant behavior. The vast majority of people's irrational fears are associated precisely with the mechanisms of projection.

For example, a person who is afraid to ride the subway. The real source of danger is within him - it is some unconscious threatening idea, which he gets rid of through projection, placing this threat in an external source (in this case, the subway) and tying his fear to this object.

Aggressive feelings are often attributed to others. This is understandable, because the experience of aggression in oneself is extremely painful, and also explosive. Or, on the contrary, weakness, incompetence, inability to understand, intellectual deficiency are sent out. In such situations, projection can be compared to a saying: I notice a speck in someone else’s eye, but I don’t notice a log in my own.

There are projections of a different order. For example, the projection of one’s ideal self – i.e. a person perceives another as part of his ideal Self. In this case, a narcissistic expansion of his own Self occurs. As a rule, such idealization is replaced by severe disappointment and the associated devaluation of the previously idealized other, then “bad” parts of the Self are projected into him.

In the broadest sense, we can say that projection underlies all products of human activity - culture, mythology, religion, art, politics, social formations.

So how does perception happen? We understand perfectly well that internal experience cannot develop without external factors, but it is important to understand that internal experience is never equal to the influence of external factors; in this sense, internal experience has its own autonomy.

What happens at the moment of the meeting of external and internal. Our perception is by no means objective, like some kind of mirror, but it depends on a huge number of internal factors - mood, expectations, state, well-being. But not only from such, one might say, local aspects, but fundamentally from the generalized experience of our entire previous life and the ideas and beliefs associated with this generalization, which are overwhelmingly unconscious.

Now it’s no secret that each of us is conditioned in our behavior by some basic images, feelings, personal leitmotifs, desires that we build in our souls in the early stages of life experience. This is the power in us that stands behind the throne of the Ego. And the projection brings out this experience, this power hidden behind the throne of the Ego. This, in fact, is the meaning of projection. It’s not about seeing it in others, but through discovering it in others, finding it in yourself, i.e. regain your own projection.

After all, our perception of reality is not a passive act, not a reflection of the external situation in the form in which it seems to be given. In the process of perception, internal factors that condition us - the features of our history, thinking, and worldview in general - take an active part. It is, rather, an active act in which our imagination participates, activated by our focus on something, the desire to discover something, or, conversely, the desire to avoid something, not notice, and avoid meeting something unpleasant. We can say that we not only perceive reality, but we create it, create it, construct it.

Until we know ourselves, we project unconscious parts of ourselves, our personality onto others, in turn becoming screens for their projections. We project, among other things, our long-held expectations, fears, prejudices, hopes and dreams. Such projections, in their most dramatic manifestations, can become a prison for ourselves and our partners, contributing to rigidity, monotony, stagnation in life and relationships, disappointments and breakups.

So, we understand that the environment, the world, other people are not the same as we perceive and see them. But at the same time, it is extremely important for us exactly how we see all this. And the problem is how to interpret one's own perceptions.

Our world is the way we create it - from illusions to understanding ourselves and others

So we understand that our beliefs underlie the context of life we ​​live, and behind every human choice there are deeply held beliefs that are fundamentally unconscious.

And here we turn to the sphere of correlation and interaction between the real and the imaginary. The problem is to learn to see reality, to recognize it, to recognize oneself, to separate one from the other. But again, what does it mean to see reality? After all, we cannot see the whole reality, in its entirety. In this sense, objectivity is an unattainable ideal; we can only approach a more accurate understanding of what is happening.

We are not dealing with statements, but with assumptions. In psychology there is such a thing as a sacred wound. The sacred wound (Jean Huston) is a powerful, wounding experience that a person cannot cope with in his own strength. Often this traumatic state is projected by the human psyche onto external reality (or onto one’s own body). Then external reality is constantly subject to modification by this negative, difficult experience of a person. But a person may not be aware of this, neither in sleep nor in spirit, as they say.

In this regard, it is very important to remember your past, your whole life, to explore and discover the key drama of your life, how it is refracted in the peculiarities of our perception of the world, the perception of people. We discover this image of the sacred wound and try to connect it with projections of how this image is manifested in our real relationships with people, what we project into them.

By trying to observe our own perceptions, as well as the projections associated with them, we can lift these veils, gradually approaching the awareness of deeper things in ourselves. Then change can happen to us. In general, any change begins with the fact that you begin to perceive something differently. M. Proust once said: “The magic of discovery lies not in discovering new landscapes, but in acquiring new eyes.”

Without projections and further identification with these projections, the development of our Self, our personality, does not occur. When our ability to move beyond our own projections and expectations is strengthened, we can see the world in a completely different way, and also see the other person in a much more authentic way, in their nature.

And the problem in connection with the action of projective mechanisms is not at all that we overcome projection, learning to perceive everything “correctly”, objectively. In this sense, there is no objectivity; objectivity is a kind of abstract construct, an unattainable ideal. Our life is permeated with dialectics. What we can do is try to connect the contradictory parts of our experience, trying to reconcile these contradictions, exploring the mutual cross-projections that arise in this process - our own and others.

Then we will be able to see our own beauty, as well as the beauty of other people, the beauty of the world around us.

beauty is in the eye of the beholder

There is a well-known expression “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Based on this understanding, the beauty that we see in another person in the world is a reflection of our own beauty.

The world does not change, life does not change, the world is as it is. We are changing. Our view of life, of ourselves, of other people changes. When we see and experience our own beauty, that's when we begin to notice the beauty around us. In this context, the beauty that we see in the world is our own beauty, which we reflect through other people, through other objects (created by us or someone else).

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