Projections and Reflections
The psychosocial dangers of wish fulfillment
In psychotherapy, rarely is the presenting problem the core one. We eventually get to the bottom of things to see what uglier thing the surface problem was opaquely reflecting. The same is usually true for everyday problems.
“We suffer more often in imagination than in reality,” Seneca said. But this suffering can double back into reality as it stretches outside of imagination and into the social world via a psychological mechanism called projection. We project onto others our past and present fears and desires, effectively morphing them into playthings against which we test what we wish to gain, prove, or protect. We might mask feelings of attraction toward somebody by being cold or disguise hatred in the clothes of the overly nice. We might try to get even with the world because we feel treated unfairly by our minds. We might talk too much to get the attention we never had. This uncontrolled word vomit repulses most listeners, driving them away. But we can become aware of these habits of the unconscious and do something about it.
