Projection: do you see your flaws in others? (EN)

(Pincha aquí para leer una entrada relacionada con esta en español)


In Freudian psychoanalytic theory, defense mechanisms are unconscious strategies brought into play to cope with reality and to maintain self-image and self-esteem. Healthy persons normally use different defenses throughout life. A defense mechanism becomes pathological only when its persistent use leads to maladaptive behavior and the individual is adversely affected. 


The purpose of the Defense Mechanisms is to protect the mind and the self from anxiety, social sanctions or to provide a refuge from a situation with which one cannot currently cope.

I was talking to a friend today and he told me he used to have a hard time every time he fell in love with someone. After a while he started becoming very jealous if for example, he was calling his girlfriend and she did not pick up right away or her phone was busy. Those feelings of jealousy would not go away until he finally could reach her and she would say that she was talking to her mother, for example.

Why does this happen? Why are some people consumed with intense, irrational suspicions that their lovers are unfaithful? 

Social psychology has a way to explain this, a theory that would also explain why gay people are vilified and attacked by many heterosexuals, or why people would form stereotypes of groups whose members they scarcely know, such Mexicans in the US or South Americans in Spain.

One traditional answer to such questions invokes the concept of projection, one of the many psychoanalytical theory defense mechanisms.  According to this view, when people are motivated to avoid seeing certain faults in themselves, they contrive instead to see those same faults in others. It is well known that repressed homosexuals have prosecuted and persecuted gay men throughout history.

Here is a personal example to see how projection works.

I used to have a roommate who would blame me for everything that would happen in the house. If the phone or the internet was not working, he would break into my room yelling “What did you do with the phone line?” I would simply pause reading my book for a moment, glance at him while saying “nothing” and resume my reading. 

Roommate: well, you must have done something, why is it not working then?

Alen: How could I have done something? I’ve been all day working out of the house, I came home an hour ago and I’ve been reading since.

He would enrage and continue yelling until he finally found he disconnected the router by mistake to plug in his charger for his mobile phone.

He still never apologized for it.

I remember one time I came from a trip. I had been one month gone from the house. I was just at the hallway carrying my luggage, and about to close the door, when he would see me enter and say:

Roommate: Where have you put the remote? It is not in the living room!

Alen: I don’t know if you noticed I’ve been a gone for a month… I’m just entering through the door; I haven’t even stepped inside the living, yet.

Modern psychology has a different way than psychoanalytical theories to look at the projection phenomenon.

We use the term “chronically accessible construct” to explain it. A construct is an idea, a concept which is permanently available (chronically accessible) in your brain, ready to be brought into your attention.

It is like when, for example, you want to buy a lawnmower and you walk around the city and you notice all the shops where they sell it: garden centers, hardware stores, etc. Places you haven’t noticed before. Or when your wife is pregnant and you start noticing all the pregnant women on the street and everybody who is taking his son for a walk in the stroller.  

From this point of view someone who is constantly thinking his partner might be cheating on him, it is not only because he himself is a cheater, which could possibly be the case as well, making also “cheating” chronically accessible, but rather that cheating is an idea that he would hate so much in himself and in others that the concept becomes chronically accessible in his memory.

Trying to suppress a thought makes it even more chronically accessible. If someone tells you “try not to think of a triangle”, and then you walk into a room with squares, circles and triangles, what is the thing you are going to repeatedly notice more?

The consequence is that the concepts one is suppressing will become chronically accessible. Chronically accessible traits dominate people's interpretations of others' behavior. The final outcome of this defensive process, then, is that threatening traits will be projected onto others.

This means, that when you are facing an ambiguous situation, you will interpret it by using your chronically accessible constructs. For example, if you call your girlfriend and she does not pick up. There are multiple alternative interpretations to it, however if cheating is a threatening trait that is chronically accessible to you, that will be your first interpretation. It will happen automatically and it will take control of your emotions instantly.

Then, if you are aware of that (let’s say you have done some therapy to become more aware of yourself) you can work your way out of it, but trying to suppress it will only make it worse, as it has been demonstrated in numerous experiments in the lab.

I hope this post has enlightened you a little about projection and the next time you feel like judging someone or yelling at someone for something you dislike, ask yourself how often you get disturbed by it, if other people would also get disturbed in that situation or make the same interpretation as you do, or if it could very well be a chronically accessible construct that it has just been activated.