Thresholds

Projections: Living in an illusory world

Projections isolate us from our environment

...it is not the conscious subject but the unconscious which does the projecting. Hence one meets with projections, one does not make them. The effect of projection is to isolate the subject from his environment, since instead of a real relation to it there is not only an illusory one. Projections change the world into the replica of one's own unknown face. ...The more projections are thrust in between the subject and the environment, the harder it is for the ego to see through its illusions.

...consciously [the creator of the projection] is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veils his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him.

Carl Jung, Aion, Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. (The Portable Jung, edited by Joseph Campbell, p. 146-147)

Comment:

The journey will destroy
our self-deluding projections

by Reg Harris

Copyright © 2007 by Reg Harris. All rights reserved. All rights reserved. Apart from properly cited quotes and short excerpts, no part of this article can be copied or used in any form without written permission from the author. For permission to use, please contact me.

In life, one type of Hero's Journey is the Journey to bring the shadow to awareness to reduce its ability to sabotage our lives. The call to adventure comes when the discrepancy between reality and our perceived reality (colored and distorted by our own projections) becomes intolerable. Jung likens the veil of illusions spun by our projections to a cocoon.

If we accept the call, we begin the journey to assimilate the shadow energies and integrate our life. At the end of the difficult journey, we will, like the butterfly, emerge from the cocoon to a life of flight and beauty, where we can join the winds of life in a dance of discovery and growth. We will have learned to change our self-destructive behavior and live a more self-directed life, a life of self-knowledge and self-acceptance. We will have freed the fountain of our own loving and creative energies.

If we reject the call, the cocoon, to use Jung's words, "will completely envelop" us. We will continue to project our own unconscious fears, inadequacies and self-hatreds onto others and the world. As our perception becomes ever more divorced from reality, our bitterness, anger, defensiveness and isolation will grow—eventually consuming us and destroying our lives.

The great writers knew the shadow, even if they didn't call it that directly. Joseph Conrad wrote about it in The Heart of Darkness as did Shakespeare in Hamlet, Macbeth and many other plays. Hemingway battled his own shadows through his writing, much as Santiago battled the great fish in The Old Man and the Sea. We see the shadow at work in Death of a Salesman, with the two sons, Happy and Biff, symbolically in the roles of the call accepted and the call refused. There are hundreds of other examples because the shadow manifests itself symbolically in virtually all great works of literature and film.

Relating to literature in terms of recognizing and living with (controlling?) one's shadow energies can open a new relevancy in literature and give our students some life-long personal benefits from the fiction.