What is projection in psychology? Seeing yourself in others
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6 min read
In psychology, projection is a defense mechanism: you take a feeling, trait or impulse you can’t accept in yourself and see it in someone else instead. The person who keeps accusing a partner of lying while hiding things of their own is projecting, and most of us do some version of it every week without noticing.
We’re a small church in Anna, Texas, and the work we do on Sundays and in ceremony comes back to one thing: owning your own reactions. Projection is one of the main ways we avoid that, so it’s worth understanding well.
Where the idea comes from
Sigmund Freud wrote about projection in the 1890s, first while trying to explain paranoia. In his 1911 case study of Daniel Paul Schreber, he described how a feeling a person can’t bear to own, such as “I hate him,” gets turned around and placed outside as “he hates me.” The feeling stays alive. It just stops being yours.
His daughter Anna Freud organized the idea further in her 1936 book The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence. She listed ten defenses the mind uses to keep anxiety down, among them repression, regression, reaction formation, introjection, sublimation and projection. Two things about defense mechanisms are worth keeping in mind:
- They happen automatically. You don’t decide to project. You just end up certain that the other person is the angry one, the jealous one, the judgmental one.
- Everyone uses them. Projection isn’t a diagnosis or a character flaw. It’s an ordinary way the mind keeps uncomfortable things at a distance.
Everyday examples of projection
Projection is easy to spot in other people and hard to spot in yourself. A few common shapes it takes:
- Someone who has thought about cheating becomes suspicious of every text their partner gets.
- A person who quietly feels lazy can’t stand “lazy” coworkers and talks about them constantly.
- “Why are you getting so defensive?” said in a voice that is clearly defensive.
- You walk into a room sure that everyone is judging how you look, when the harshest judge in the room is your own inner voice.
- A parent pushes a child hard toward the success they never let themselves go after, and calls it the child’s dream.
Projection works with good qualities too. When we put a teacher, a guru or a new partner on a pedestal, we’re often seeing our own strength, wisdom or worth in them because we haven’t claimed it in ourselves yet. That can feel lovely for a while. It also hands someone else a job that belongs to us.
One caution: not every judgment is a projection. Sometimes the coworker really is lazy, and sometimes the partner really is lying. The useful question is “how much of this charge is mine?”
Projection and displacement
These two get mixed up. In displacement, you keep the feeling as yours but aim it at a safer target: angry at your boss, you snap at your partner. In projection, the feeling or trait gets moved onto the other person and you stop owning it at all: you’re sure your partner is the angry one. Both protect you from looking at something. Both keep the real work from getting done.
Jung, projection and the shadow
Carl Jung took the idea further. He used the word “shadow” for the parts of ourselves we’ve pushed out of sight, usually early in life, because they didn’t seem acceptable. Our shadow work post goes into it in more depth. For Jung, projection is how the shadow shows up in daily life. We don’t see the rejected parts in the mirror. We see them in other people.
In Aion (1951) he wrote that projections “change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face.” That’s the practical point. The people who irritate us most, and the ones we admire most, can tell us a lot about the parts of ourselves we haven’t met yet.
This is close to how our church works. Our Welcome course describes ayahuasca as something that “works like a mirror,” and our FAQ says we see feelings of negative energy or entities “as coming from inside us: our fears, insecurities and old wounds.” Whether you’re in a ceremony, a Sunday circle or an argument in the kitchen, the move is the same: take back what you’ve placed outside yourself and look at it.
How to notice your own projections
Because projection is automatic, you usually catch it after the fact. These are the signs we’ve learned to watch for:
- Your reaction is much bigger than what happened. A small thing someone did leaves you stewing for days.
- You’re certain about someone’s motives. “She did that to make me look bad” is a guess presented as a fact.
- The same complaint follows you from person to person. Different bosses, different partners, the same story.
- You’re harshest about a trait you insist you don’t have.
- You talk about the person a lot. The time you spend on someone’s flaws is a rough measure of how much of you is tied up in them.
Self-inquiry questions for projection
When you notice a strong charge toward someone, write down what bothers you about them in one sentence. Then work through these:
- Where have I done this, or wanted to do this, myself?
- What was I told about this trait growing up? Was it punished, mocked or forbidden?
- If I said this sentence about myself, how true would it be?
- What am I feeling right now under the irritation: fear, shame, envy, grief?
- What would I have to feel if this person weren’t the problem?
- For someone I admire: what do I see in them that I haven’t let myself own?
Go slowly. The first answer is usually a defense of its own (“but I’m nothing like that”). Stay with the question a little longer than is comfortable. If you journal, the patterns get clearer over a few weeks.
What to do with what you find
Owning a projection doesn’t mean beating yourself up. It means saying, plainly, “that one’s mine.” Often the charge drops the moment you admit it, and you can see the other person a bit more clearly.
It also doesn’t mean letting people treat you badly. You can own your part of a reaction and still set a limit about someone’s behavior. The two go together: once you know what’s yours, it’s easier to see what isn’t.
Talking helps. On Sundays our sharing circle has a simple rule from our Welcome course: “speak only for yourself, no advice, no responding to others, no fixing.” Speaking only for yourself is good practice against projection. It’s hard to say “you always” when the rule is to talk about you.
If what you find is heavy, such as suspicion that’s wrecking a relationship, old trauma, or a sense that people are out to get you that won’t let up, see a therapist. Projection is a normal habit of mind, and some of what sits behind it needs more help than a journal can give.
If you’d like to practice this with other people, come to Sunday Service, Sundays 3 to 6pm in Anna.