What Is Projection in Psychology Lingo?

by Carol Campbell, MFT

Projection is a common aspect of communication that is easily misunderstood. Knowing what projection is and what causes it and what to do about it are helpful bits of knowledge if you want to improve your relationships with other people. Here are some key points:

1. Projection happens unconsciously. It isn't typically something you try to do.

2. Projection is a defense that you use automatically in order to protect yourself from bad feelings and thoughts. Staying well protected is a good thing, but generally speaking, projection causes you trouble. There are better ways to take care of yourself.

3. Projection removes a bad feeling or thought that you have inside yourself and conveniently locates it in someone else, so that you don't have to have it associated with yourself anymore. Instead you then feel free to criticize the other person for demonstrating such a bad feeling or having such a bad thought.

Example: Tina is very proud of her new golden retriever puppy, Bentley, and she wants the extended family to love him, too. She secretly is hurt that her father isn't more interested in the dog, but she can't let that thought into her awareness. Tina only thinks she should have happy thoughts about her father.

At a gathering of the extended family, Tina notices that Aunt Martha is spending a lot of time with Bentley, and Bentley loves the attention. Afterwards, Tina is furious with Aunt Martha for having hogged Bentley at the party. She tells herself that Aunt Martha should be reprimanded somehow for having been so thoughtless as to keep Bentley from Dad.

What is really going on is that Tina is projecting her anger at her father onto poor Aunt Martha, because she is too scared to acknowledge her anger that her father is not as interested in Bentley as she wishes he could be. Anger at Dad is a loaded proposition, but it's easier for Tina to get mad at Aunt Martha – through projection.

4. It is not hard to identify projection once you start looking for it, and then you can learn to have more mature relationships based in reality. The next time you notice you are really mad at another person, or their behavior is upsetting you, take a look deep inside yourself. Are you thinking that person is being selfish, when really you are the one being selfish? Are you telling someone else not to be so difficult, when you are the one being difficult?

5. Projection comes to your "rescue" when you are afraid to own your own feelings. A visit to a Marriage and Family Therapist can be very helpful in identifying what sorts of issues trigger your projections. Your family and friends will appreciate your efforts! An emotionally healthy person does not rely on projection to feel safe, but rather is accepting of his or her own ideas and feelings. When those ideas and feelings are problematic for some reason, the emotionally healthy person will put effort into figuring out why that is so, and how things could be different. When you are interested in learning how to communicate without projecting, you will become much more interested in your own internal world than in what other people think, even about you.

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Carol L. Campbell, MFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist providing psychotherapy and psychoanalysis for individual adults and couples in Palo Alto, California. She has degrees from Brown University and Santa Clara University and has been licensed since 1991. Carol is a graduate of the Palo Alto Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Training Program sponsored at Stanford by the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and was a candidate at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California in San Francisco from 2010-2011. She is also a clinical member of the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists and the Northern California Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology.