Yesterday, we looked at the projection we do when we hate. We choose our hate targets not simply because they’re odious, but because they’re specifically odious in ways that cause specific, shadow-driven ragequakes inside us. Yes, I made that word up, but it feels quite apropos.
Let me take a giant step back today and say that projecting material onto other people is a common practice – and it’s not always horrific. Projection isn’t a terrible thing – it’s a human thing. We all project our shadow material, because we usually can’t work with it in straightforward ways. (If we could, it wouldn’t be called the shadow, would it?) In fact, most of us project our “good” shadow material onto others just as frequently as we project our “bad” material.
For instance, when we admire a public figure, we often project our best selves onto them – we let them hold our talent, our courage, our beauty, our prowess, and our brilliance (these traits are suppressed into the shadow just as often as our uglier traits are). This is often a necessary passage, because most of us can’t just say, “My family raised me to be scientific, but I’ll just ignore that and become a painter.” No, we may need to observe and idolize painters in order to bring our own art forward. We may even attach ourselves to certain painters (as if they personified painting) in a form of projection known as adoration.
Psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who contributed massively to the understanding of the human shadow, pointed out that projection is sometimes the only way we can become aware of our shadow material – he even went so far as to say that projection is the only thing that gets us out of our parent’s houses. So adoring someone else’s talent is a safe way to move toward our own suppressed talents.
However, you’ll notice that strong adoration often moves to disappointment when our adored person acts like a regular person and not a divine being. This is the point when the projection slips, and we’re supposed to let go and move into our own talent (and get back into our own lives).
Unfortunately, most of us don’t figure this out. We remain attached to our adored person, and try to change them into our perfect vision once again – which launches us on a roller-coaster ride with them. When we find ways to reattach the projections, everything is peachy, but if they slip, we have to start all over again. It’s an extremely unstable attachment that seesaws back and forth between infatuation and disillusionment. In many cases, this sort of adoration will even drop into hatred – into a fierce and shadowy attachment (think of stalkers, internet trolls, and crazed fans and you’ll get the picture). This intense form of adoration, then, helps us understand what hatred is all about.
Hatred is a twisted form of adoration – and that’s where that strange enmeshed glee comes in. Hatred is the underside of adoration – where the intensity, the shadow projection, and the enmeshment are identical in intensity, but different only in the material being projected.
