**🔼 Up:** [[Defence Mechanisms]] **\#️⃣ Tags:** #Psychology #DefenceMechanism > **🌱 Planted:** Mon 20 January 2025 --- ***Projection is the act of pushing unacceptable emotions onto someone else***. > [!quote] > “The most dangerous psychological mistake is the projection of the shadow onto others; this is the root of almost all conflicts.” — [[Carl Jung]] Projection as a [[Defence Mechanisms|Defence Mechanism]] is where someone attributes their unacceptable feelings, beliefs or attitudes onto another person. This usually happens when our internal experience feels too threatening to acknowledge, so there's an element of [[Denial|Denial]] here too. By disowning these qualities, it enables us to maintain an illusion of safety, although it's usually not super nice being on the receiving end of a projection, especially if you're unaware of what's going on and end up taking it on! [[Carl Jung]] would call these shadow projections, where parts of one's shadow are attributed to someone else. Similarly, it's rare the projector has any type of awareness that they are projecting onto someone else—it's entirely unconscious. This makes it difficult for them to recognise that what they're seeing in someone else is actually a reflection of themselves, but, it also makes it a [[Projections are a gold mine for self-awareness|gold mine for self-awareness]]. An example of projection could be someone holding in deep feelings of anger they're unable to consciously acknowledge, and because of that they're feeling some type of disturbance inside which they don't know what to do with. This energy needs to be discharged and so they might then instead accuse say a coworker, friend or family member of being hostile or aggressive. The key here is that the feeling of anger and aggression starts within them, and not the other person—it is only projected onto them. Where Projection is the external act of attributing and pushing someone's unaccepted emotions onto another, [[Introjection|Introjection]] represents the internal act of taking on those projections. Projection is different to [[Projective Identification|Projective Identification]] though, which is where the person projecting influences the other to embody and identify with what they are projecting. # See Also - Projection and [[Projective Identification|Projective Identification]] is driven by [[Splitting|Splitting]], where the person who is projecting is unable to accept, acknowledge or tolerate the "bad" objects (internalised [[Object Relations]]) of themselves, so they instead project it outward onto others.