the basics
what the psych textbooks say
First, I want to start with the typical definitions of ‘Projection™’ and ‘Transference™’ because otherwise things can get confusing, because I use the word slightly differently - more in the vein of Carl Jung’s perspective, which I’ll go over too. I’ve used ™ to indicate when I’m using the word in the more official capacity vs when I’m using it the way I like to use it.
Officially, Projection™ is when someone is in denial of their own emotions and then believes that another person has them instead. Such as:
Someone being angry at their boss, but because they’re disowning those emotions they believe their boss is angry at them instead.
A married person who is attracted to their coworker who accuses the coworker of flirting with them.
Someone who feels scared in a scenario but then ‘takes charge’ and ‘protects’ their “scared” friend (who isn’t actually afraid at all) and removes both of them from the situation.
The official definition of Projection™ is, from other sources, also someone casting someone else with their own (perceived) negative traits in general, rather than just emotions. Such as:
Someone who has impulses to steal other people’s things who then fears like their items will be stolen by those around them & feels most people are potential thieves.
A mother who scolds their child for “being a showoff” when clearly the parent is the one who is attention-seeking/needing & disowning that trait onto their child.
Someone who bullies others for being queer when they themselves are in denial of being queer in some way.
The official definition of Transference™ is someone projecting the role of or feelings about a past person/scenario onto someone else in the present, such as:
Someone who was overly coddled by their mother (e.g. does all their housework & praises them constantly) and expects their partner to treat them as their mother would treat them, growing resentful if they don’t.
Someone who was abandoned by a parent as a child and is overly concerned with their partner leaving them, becoming hysterical at healthy alone time etc.
Someone who was constantly criticised for laziness by their father and overworks to please their male manager/s.
Another layer to Transference™ is specific to someone Transferring™ onto their Therapist specifically - but this definition is unecessary here.
the mystic’s definition of projection
I use the word ‘projection’ because you’re like a projector playing the movie of your inner world out on the external world. Perception & interaction can be clear of past projection and you can be interacting with someone in earnest, or you can be actively projecting your past onto the scenarios in front of you, and that’s going to involve both the projection of emotions, traits, intentions, and roles (technically Transference™) onto other people - this is also a muddling of energetic boundaries. To me there seems to always be a case of Transference™ within every Projection™. For example in the case of the example above where the person is angry at their boss and fears their boss is angry at them, it’s thematically likely that when they were a child and they were angry at their parent, the parent reacted with anger and they learned to repress their own anger and fear their parent’s - so they’re painting/projecting/Transferring™ their parent over their boss as well as Projecting™ their emotion onto them. In the example of the scared person who is pretending they’re the saviour and ‘rescuing their friend from the scary thing they themselves are actually afraid of, it’s thematically likely that their parent was a fearful person and despite being afraid themselves they had to muster up courage and ‘save’ their parent from what they were afraid of. All of this is conjecture but in every single case of projection I’ve detangled, it’s always had this kind of Universal poetry to it in which we’re just acting out a storyline that had us freezing an aspect of us at a younger age where we weren’t able to feel safe & learned to cope through different means. In any case, I personally find it of very little use to break down all these phenomena into little labels and specific definitions and instead elect to call it all projection - I’ve done my due diligence clarifying that I use to word loosely where some therapists would use it very specifically. I didn’t learn all this from textbooks or therapy; I learned it from understanding the outside world as a mirror of myself and calling all my distorted projections back into myself and alchemising them. I’m closer to a Mystic and Shaman than a Psych and that’s the intention behind this course (also I don’t have the piece of paper to call myself a Psych anyway). It’s not meant to take 8 years of schooling to understand the Psyche, it’s actually extremely simple when you have the right tools and you’re willing to do your own inner work.
Ultimately, all projection/Projection™/Transference™ stems from Shadow, wounds we haven’t alchemised fully - even if we’re intellectually conscious of the wound itself, the projection will keep playing and playing in our external world until we’ve integrated that Shadow into our consciousness. We unconsciously play through these storylines in our Psyche, both positive and negative, and the people or circumstances in our lives reflect those storylines. We unconsciously cast someone in our lives (such as a partner or friend - or an entity such as the government, a messiah etc.) typically in the role of one of our parents/caretakers (or otherwise someone who had authority over us or emotional impact on us in childhood).
Projection is taking the emotion or positive/negative attitude toward that past scenario and almost painting it over another person or external scenario. Sometimes that projection seems ‘positive’ - such as “this person I like is going to save me from my troubles/loneliness etc.”, in which we put the burden of our physical/emotional wellbeing on another person: the Saviour. Sometimes we cast ourselves as the Saviour too, “this person keeps mistreating me but they just don’t understand they’re wounded so I’ll keep trying to get them to heal”. Sometimes it’s negative - such as “my boss gave me some ‘areas to improve upon’ and I’m so angry I want to punch him in the face”, in which we are emotionally reactive (even if repressing it) to something that triggers us: the ‘Bad Guy’ / Devil etc. Sometimes we’re the Devil boss projecting our Shadow on our employee, “Bob just doesn’t understand how I need my paperclips sorted and stored, it should be self explanatory!”
Seriously, 99% of the time, we’re both playing a role in each other’s stories.
The tricky part in all of this is just to recognise we’re projecting and pulling back from the story our emotional body is telling us. There are a lot of people who would hear their boss’ criticism and justify their reaction to themselves. The thing is, the emotion is always valid, it comes from an actual event in the past that did happen to us in which we were abandoned or victimised in some capacity - the reaction & doubling down on the story is the part we need to alchemise in order to come to more consciousness. In simple terms, the emotion we experience is valid - the meaning we derive from it isn’t necessarily accurate or serving us.
carl jung & the mystic crew
Carl Jung (arguably the modern father of what we now call Shadow Work) was a mystic, babe. He regularly induced drugless psychic trance states upon himself, visited the otherworld frequently, and a mystic is specifically ‘someone who seeks personal experiences with God’ - which he had achieved innumerable times from what I can tell from his writing & interviews. He was, in my eyes, a Shaman, mystic, Shadow Worker, Alchemist etc. They’re honestly all really the same thing if the person is doing it well rather than performatively or with limited consciousness- though arguments can be made that Shamans can also be different types of psychics/energy workers/psychedelic facilitators and not necessarily have a grasp on Shadow/their own Shadow.. though I would caution anyone to consider avoiding those who don’t have a solid grasp on Shadow (no need to avoid if they call it by another name or understand it through a different cultural framework, of course). Jung notably learned a lot of how he understood Shadow from the Alchemists, Daoists, and other mystics & metaphysical philosophers - none of whom called it Shadow. The work I’m teaching you in this course? It’s the great work - passed on through millennia; generations of Shamans, mystics, gurus, Alchemists, Clever Folk, and whichever other labels for Spiritual doctors/facilitators/leaders in every country, continent, and culture. Everyone who understands it to their core will translate it with different words and have slightly different frameworks around it, but it’s all ultimately an interpretation on how to first find your way back to your soul, and then further how to find your way back to God/Creator. I could wax poetic but we’re really getting off track from a simple explanation on Projection.
Jung said of Projection; “Projections change the world into the replica of one's own unknown face” - the unknown face being the Shadow. Jung saw Transference™ being a more intense version of Projection™, more like a cluster of projections all from one person from one’s past (again, usually a parent) onto one specific other person - and I can get behind that idea (though he was seemingly mostly speaking of the client/therapist relationship where I see it happening everywhere). I can see how for relationships that are less close to our inner circle we project pieces here and there and for more intimate relationships we tend to paint more and more onto the other person, particularly if we have an intense case of trauma in our past. For a lot of people one of the most intimate relationships they’ll ever have is with a Therapist so this is where intense Transference is seen most often - though I believe that is changing as we all grow emotionally deeper, more authentic, and more conscious.
examples of projection
You make a piece of art and show your friend, the friend doesn’t respond well to it (or at least not as you’d have preferred) and it felt very painful to receive the feedback and had you lashing out or emotionally overwhelmed afterwards - in this case it’s because your creative works were diminished and criticised by your mother in childhood.
An upper manager at work displayed a little bit of entitlement in a request they made of you one time and you’ve been harboring resentment and hate for them ever since, even though that was 3 years ago - in this case it was the entitlement your father regularly embodied in childhood that you had no ability to refuse because the dynamic was a pecking order hierarchy where he ruled the house and everyone in it with an iron fist.
When you were growing up you weren’t well cared for by your parent/caregiver, to an extreme degree. Through your life you meet kind people who you immediately cast as or imagine to be a caretaker despite not knowing much about them or whether they’re willing to take on that role for you - in this case you’re projecting a version of the unconditionally loving mother / protective father archetype on them in hopes that they will take care of you as you should have been in childhood, while also expecting far too much from someone you’ve just met with no verbal communication / consent about these expectations other than the hope / projection itself.
Your friend asks you questions of inquiry to understand your perspective on the topic you’re discussing because they’re earnestly trying to understand you, you get defensive and agitated at the line of questioning because you can’t see their earnestness through your projection of malicious intent and it almost turns into a one sided argument - in this case it’s because your father used to relentlessly grill you in childhood in an attempt to prove that you deserved the punishment he already wanted to give out because he felt insecure & wanted to punch down.
You overhear your neighbour being critical of her child and raising her voice at them. You get deeply irritated and immediately rant to your friend and berate the neighbour - in this case it’s a series of memories from your childhood where your parent criticised you similarly.
story insistence
Often when we’re looping on the story and/or insisting that someone else “has to” understand our “perspective” (story), it’s because we’re not validating our emotions/perspective ourselves by just feeling them fully without clinging to the story/belief/insistence - often we’ve given our power and authority over to someone else in hopes they tell us that yes we are the perfect victim to [this dastardly crime] and that really we’re right to react the way our Shadow wants us to & feel indignant at the world. Again in this scenario we’ve placed that person into the projection of one of our parents/caregivers who we wished would have given us the validation & support to feel our emotions back when we were small.
The solution to all of this is to just validate our emotions by allowing them to pass through regardless of what anyone else thinks, but as always it’s easier said than done when we have belief systems blocking us from claiming our own autonomy or fearing the pain & mess of emotional rebirth. When we’re looping on the story we’re trying to get the conscious mind to find the solution so that we don’t have to feel painful or scary emotions instead of allowing the emotional body & physical body to do what they do best (emotional transmutation). It’s completely normal and understandable for us to avoid feeling the pain that we didn’t have the capacity/support to feel in childhood - it’s hella painful - but it’s only shooting ourselves in the foot in the long run, and hugely detrimental to our relationships and greater community when you zoom out to the wider picture.
understanding projection deeper
The method in which I’ve been able to understand projection so deeply is because I’ve integrated much of my own Shadow. So part of getting to understand the mechanism of projection will be to do your own Shadow Work. These concepts must be embodied by understanding them internally and can’t just be learned on paper. When you truly integrate in a scenario you’re projecting your Shadow into, afterwards the projection fades, but you see how projection works in real time. Suddenly the person you were unconsciously painting your parent on becomes neutral, they’re just themselves, without your emotional spaghetti on top, distorting how you see them. The scenario you think is a huge issue dissolves itself. You actually detach. Sometimes that detachment looks like understanding your expectations of the other person were loaded up with your own emotional shrapnel, other times that detachment comes with realising that person isn’t actually someone who belongs in your inner sphere. The only way to truly know clearly is to transmute first and then let clarity land when the path is clear for our own higher wisdom. So really the only way to find a more embodied understanding of projection is to start unearthing your own Shadow..