Concept
Projection
Attributing one’s own unacknowledged wishes, feelings or qualities to another.
Development
1896
introduced by Sigmund Freud
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.
In Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905)
1905
developed by Sigmund Freud
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.
In Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (1905)
1919
developed by Sigmund Freud
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.
In The 'Uncanny' (1919)
1926
developed by Sigmund Freud
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.
In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926)
1946
reworked by Melanie Klein
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.
In Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms (1946)
1964
critiqued by Jacques Lacan
Lacan lists projection with identification, idealisation and introjection as terms analysts handle loosely, as if their sense were self-evident. He rejects the common view that projecting and introjecting are simply the reverse of each other: he had long pointed out that one belongs to a field dominated by the symbolic and the other to the imaginary, so that in one dimension at least they never meet. In his earlier seminars it is projection that belongs to the imaginary.
In The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1973)
Relations
introduced by
- 1896 Sigmund Freud
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
- 1905 Sigmund Freud
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.
- 1919 Sigmund Freud
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.
- 1926 Sigmund Freud
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
- 1946 Melanie Klein
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.
gave rise to
- 1946 Projective identification
Projective identification grew out of Klein's account of projection. When split-off parts of the self are projected into the mother, she is felt to contain them and to be the bad (or good) self, and an identification follows that Klein takes as the prototype of aggressive object relations. She speaks of 'projective identification' in the same paper and gave the term its formal introduction in the 1952 revision.
critiqued by
- 1964 Jacques Lacan
Lacan lists projection with identification, idealisation and introjection as terms analysts handle loosely, as if their sense were self-evident. He rejects the common view that projecting and introjecting are simply the reverse of each other: he had long pointed out that one belongs to a field dominated by the symbolic and the other to the imaginary, so that in one dimension at least they never meet. In his earlier seminars it is projection that belongs to the imaginary.
opposes
- Introjection
Projection and introjection are paired as opposite movements between inside and outside: putting out of the self what belongs to it, and taking into the self what lies outside. Ferenczi coined introjection as the counterpart of projection, and Klein treats the two as working in constant interplay from the beginning of life. Lacan disputed that they are simple reciprocals, placing them in different registers.
Works
- 1905
Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria
Freud's case history of "Dora", an eighteen-year-old Viennese woman (later identified as Ida Bauer) whom he treated for about eleven weeks at the end of 1900; written in 1901, it appeared in 1905 in the Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie. Dora suffered from a nervous cough, loss of voice, shortness of breath and low moods, and her father brought her to Freud after her parents found a letter in which she hinted at suicide. Behind the symptoms Freud uncovers a family entanglement: her father's affair with Frau K., and the advances of Frau K.'s husband, Herr K., whom Dora slapped after a proposal by a lake and whose earlier kiss had filled her with disgust. Freud reads her symptoms as the expression of repressed sexual wishes — love for Herr K., a revived childhood attachment to her father and, at the deepest layer, love for Frau K. — and builds the case around the interpretation of two dreams: a burning house from which her father rescues her while her mother wants to save her jewel case, and a wandering through a strange town after her father's death. Dora broke off the treatment on 31 December. In the Postscript Freud attributes the failure to his not having recognised and interpreted in time the transference of her feelings for Herr K. onto himself, and gives his first sustained account of transference as a new edition of old impulses directed at the physician.
- 1919
Freud's essay, published in the fifth volume of Imago in 1919, takes up a question he says aesthetics has neglected: what sets the uncanny apart within the wider class of the frightening. Against Ernst Jentsch, who in 1906 traced the feeling to intellectual uncertainty before the new and unfamiliar, Freud argues that the uncanny is the kind of fright that leads back to what is known of old and long familiar. He reaches this by two routes. The first is linguistic: entries from the dictionaries of Sanders and of the Grimms show heimlich ranging from 'homely, familiar' to 'concealed, secret', until it coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Schelling's remark that the uncanny is whatever ought to have remained hidden and has come to light becomes a key to the essay. The second route is a survey of uncanny experiences and fictions. Reading E. T. A. Hoffmann's 'The Sandman', Freud places the story's effect not in the automaton Olimpia but in the figure who tears out children's eyes, and reads the fear for the eyes as a substitute for castration anxiety, with the good and the bad father split across the tale's paired figures. Following Otto Rank's study of the double, he shows the double turning from an insurance against death, born of primary narcissism, into a harbinger of death, and links it to the self-observing, self-critical agency in the ego. Involuntary repetition of the same, which he ties to a compulsion to repeat in the unconscious, the omnipotence of thoughts, the evil eye, the return of the dead, severed limbs, being buried alive, and the blurring of the line between fantasy and reality are traced in turn to infantile complexes or to surmounted animistic beliefs. The female genitals, which neurotic men often call uncanny, he reads as the entrance to the human being's first home: the prefix 'un-' is the mark of repression. In the last section Freud concedes that his thesis cannot be reversed, and that fairy tales abound in wish-fulfilments and animated objects that are not uncanny at all. He answers these objections by separating the uncanny of experience from the uncanny of fiction and, within experience, the uncanny that comes from repressed infantile complexes from the uncanny that arises when surmounted primitive beliefs seem confirmed once more. Fiction can suspend reality-testing and so spare us the uncanny, as in fairy tales, in Dante, or in Shakespeare's ghosts, or it can heighten the uncanny beyond anything life allows when the writer pretends to stay within common reality. The uncanny of repressed complexes is the more resistant of the two. Because the writer also steers the reader's identification and mood, the same material can turn comic, as in Nestroy or in Wilde's 'The Canterville Ghost'. The uncanniness of solitude, silence and darkness Freud leaves tied to the anxiety of childhood.
- 1926
Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety
Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Hemmung, Symptom und Angst), published in 1926 by the Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, is Freud's major revision of his theory of anxiety and his first systematic account of defence within the structural model of ego, id and super-ego set out in The Ego and the Id (1923). The book opens by distinguishing inhibition, a restriction of an ego function undertaken as a precaution or through an impoverishment of energy, from the symptom, the sign and substitute of an instinctual satisfaction that has not taken place and the result of repression. Its central move reverses Freud's earlier view that repressed libido is transformed directly into anxiety. Re-examining the animal phobias of Little Hans and the Wolf Man, he concludes that in both the motive force of repression was castration anxiety, the ego's fear of an external danger: anxiety makes repression, not repression anxiety. The ego is the sole seat of anxiety. It produces anxiety as a signal when it anticipates danger, and through the pleasure principle the signal enables it to inhibit the threatening process in the id. Anxiety is traced to a situation of helplessness before mounting excitation, of which birth is the prototype. Freud separates the traumatic situation, in which anxiety arises automatically, as in the actual neuroses, from the danger situation, in which the ego reproduces a weakened form of it as a warning. The danger situations form a developmental series, each tied to a phase: psychical helplessness in the immature ego, loss of the object in early childhood, castration in the phallic phase, the super-ego's anger and loss of its love in latency, and finally the fear of death, read as the super-ego projected onto the powers of fate. Neurosis arises where people go on reacting to danger situations long outgrown; symptoms are formed to remove the ego from the danger situation that anxiety signals. Neurotic anxiety is anxiety about an instinctual danger the ego does not know, as realistic anxiety is about a known one. The book compares symptom formation in phobia, conversion hysteria and obsessional neurosis. In obsessional neurosis, regression to the anal-sadistic stage, a severe super-ego and reaction formations shape the symptoms, and Freud describes undoing and isolation as defensive techniques beside repression. He reinstates 'defence' as the general term for all the ego's protective techniques, repression being one of them. He discusses Otto Rank's The Trauma of Birth (1924), crediting it with linking every danger situation to separation from the mother but rejecting the claim that the severity of the birth trauma decides who becomes neurotic; he names instead the long helplessness of the human infant, the interruption of sexual development between early childhood and puberty, and the ego's imperfect means of guarding against internal danger. The addenda distinguish five kinds of resistance and separate anxiety, the reaction to the danger that object loss brings, from pain, the reaction to the loss itself, and from mourning.
- 1946
Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms
First published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis in 1946 and reprinted, revised, in Developments in Psycho-Analysis (1952), this paper is Melanie Klein's account of the months that precede the depressive position she had described in the 1930s. In this earliest phase the infant's anxiety is predominantly persecutory and its defences predominantly schizoid; Klein names it the paranoid position, adding the term schizoid, which she takes from Ronald Fairbairn, and from 1952 calls it the paranoid-schizoid position. She holds that an ego capable of anxiety, defence and object relations exists from birth but lacks cohesion, and that its primary anxiety is a fear of annihilation arising from the death instinct within, which it deflects outward and then meets as persecution. Its chief defence is splitting: the object, at first the breast, is divided into a good and a bad one, and since the ego cannot split the object without being split itself, the same division runs through the self, sustained by idealisation, denial and omnipotent phantasies of annihilating what is bad. Klein here describes projective identification, the phantasy of forcing split-off parts of the self into the mother in order to harm, possess and control her, so that she comes to be felt as those parts; good parts of the self are projected too, which is necessary for good object relations but, in excess, depletes the ego. The paper traces how these mechanisms colour schizoid object relations and the transference, with their detachment and splitting-off of feeling, and argues that when persecutory anxiety and splitting are too strong the depressive position cannot be worked through, so that the fixation points of schizophrenia lie in this first position and are bound up with those of manic-depressive illness. Klein discusses Fairbairn's work at length, accepting much of his account of schizoid phenomena while objecting to his neglect of anxiety, aggression and the death instinct.
- 1973
The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis
The seminar Lacan gave in 1964 at the École Normale Supérieure, after the International Psychoanalytical Association had made his removal from the list of training analysts the condition for admitting the Société Française de Psychanalyse. Established by Jacques-Alain Miller, it was published by Éditions du Seuil in 1973 as Book XI of Le Séminaire, and in English in Alan Sheridan's translation. Speaking to a larger and less specialised audience than before, Lacan set out to bring coherence to four concepts on which psychoanalysis rests: the unconscious, repetition, transference and the drive. He opens with his 'excommunication', and moves from asking whether psychoanalysis is a science to asking what kind of science could include it. The seminar treats the unconscious and repetition, the gaze as objet petit a, transference and the drive, and the field of the Other, where alienation, aphanisis and the subject supposed to know are taken up.
See also
Linked from
People
References
- Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria1905Evidence for a relation
- The 'Uncanny'1919Evidence for a relation
- Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety1926Evidence for a relation
- Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms1946Evidence for a relation
- The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis1973Evidence for a relation