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Projection

Also known as Projektion

Attributing one’s own unacknowledged wishes, feelings or qualities to another.

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Broader concept
Defense
Introduced by
Sigmund Freud1896
Key works
5

introduced by

  • Sigmund Freud 1896 Freud first described projection as the defence of paranoia, in a draft on paranoia sent to Fliess in January 1895 and in 'Weitere Bemerkungen über die Abwehr-Neuropsychosen' (1896): a reproach the ego cannot bear is not acknowledged as its own but attributed to someone else, and returns from outside as delusion. The Dora case restates the mechanism: in paranoia the projection of a reproach onto another, unchanged in content and without support in reality, shows itself as the process that forms delusions.

developed by

  • Sigmund Freud 1905 In the Dora case Freud treats projection as a primitive, automatic defence that is not confined to paranoia. Defending against a self-reproach by raising the same reproach against someone else is modelled on children's tit-for-tat retorts, and Dora's reproaches against her father turn out to be lined with self-reproaches of the same content. In hysteria too, Dora's disgust at Herr K.'s embrace is read as projected by this mechanism, referring ultimately to her own discharge.
  • Sigmund Freud 1919 In Das Unheimliche Freud uses projection to explain uncanny figures and beliefs. The double is a content cast out of the ego as something foreign by a defensive effort, a survival of surmounted narcissism that returns as a figure of terror. The dread of the evil eye comes from attributing to others the envy one would feel in their place.
  • Sigmund Freud 1926 Freud revisits his earlier view that a phobia is a projection, replacing an internal instinctual danger with an external perceptual one from which one can flee. He calls the remark correct but superficial: the instinctual demand is dangerous only because it brings a real external danger, castration. In obsessional neurosis, he adds, there is no appearance of projection, since the danger is wholly internalised, and he describes the fear of death as fear of the superego projected onto the powers of fate.

reworked by

  • Melanie Klein 1946 Klein makes projection one of the first defences of the infant ego, active from the beginning of life and derived, in her view, from the deflection of the death instinct outwards. What is projected is not only an impulse or reproach but split-off parts of the self, good as well as bad, put 'into' the mother rather than 'on to' her so as to injure, control or possess her. In constant interplay with introjection, projection builds up the inner and outer world of good and bad objects.
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