Marie-Louise von Franz

"Marie Louise von Franz's Projection and Re-Collection is thorough in its wide-ranging exploration as both a map and a guide to the recognition and reclaiming of projection. Von Franz skillfully brings theory to life as she builds on and further develops C.G. Jung's research on projection". -- Julia Jewett Jungian Analyst "The book is stimulating in going to the core of psychotherapeutic work, and invites a response from psychotherapists in general and from Jungian analysts in particular". -- San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal

Reflections of the Soul

Projection and Re-collection in Jungian Psychology

Laura Mei

It occurred to Freud that the true and false impressions received by a child in his earliest experience of his parents and siblings play a role in later projections. For example, a child who has experienced his father or mother in a specifically-negative form tends to project the same father or mother image onto older men or women he meets in later life; so that an unprejudiced experience of the relevant persons is no longer possible for him. Such a negative reaction lives on — stored up in the depths of the psyche — and is projected onto outer objects at a suitable opportunity. To be more precise, what is projected is not only a memory image as one might at first conclude, but rather, a sum of characteristic qualities that constitutes a part of the person observed. If a son, for example, experiences his father as tyrannical, in later life he will, in many cases, not only project the quality of tyranny onto authority figures and father figures, but he will also behave just as tyrannically himself — though unconsciously.

The difference between projection and common error is that an error can be corrected, without difficulty by better information, and then dissolve like morning fog in the sunlight. In the case of a projection, on the other hand, the subject doing the projection defends himself strenuously against correction, or if he accepts correction, he then falls into a depression. He consequently appears to be diminished or disillusioned because the psychic energy that was invested in the projection has not flowed back to the subject but has been cut off. Thus, Jung defined projection as an unconscious — that is, unperceived and unintentional transfer — of subjective psychic elements onto an outer object. One sees in this object something that is not there, or if there, only to a small degree. Seldom, if ever, is nothing of what is projected present in the object. Jung speaks, therefore, of a hook in the object on which one hangs a projection as one hangs a coat on a coat hook.

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