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.