Skewed Projection in a Broken Mirror

by Kenneth Francis (March 2019)

The Initiate, Ian Shults, 2009

If Donald Trump, the ghosts of Socrates and Sigmund Freud walked into a bar, they’d unlikely discuss the psychological Theory of Projection. Instead, they’d probably talk about building a wall, the Oedipus complex, and the dangers of drinking hemlock.

In the circles of psychoanalysis, the term Projection, or blame-shifting, is a theory in which some people defend themselves against their own unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others. And these three men, along with many other famous and non-famous people, had to deal with Projection in their lives. And it can manifest itself in many forms, such as denial (cognitive dissonance), regression, dissociation, reaction formation, compartmentalization, etc.

It’s quite possible that the deeply flawed Freud, who allegedly fell in love with his sister-in-law, unwittingly projected his sexual fantasies onto mankind in the mother-of-all autobiographies: his popular body of writings.

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As for Trump: most of his flaws are also reflected in the traits of his many foes and fans, as we’re all flawed in some way or other. Then there’s Socrates: Monty Python’s Philosophers’ Football Match sketch had him played by Eric Idle. But the great muse was far from being idle when the dikasts of Athens probably projected their own intellectually flawed traits on him accusing him of impiety against the gods of Athens and corrupting the youth. His punishment was death by drinking a beverage of the poisonous hemlock.

Projection can also be seen in characters in literature or even TV sitcoms. In the hugely successful British TV comedy series of the 1970s, Fawlty Towers, the main character, Basil, plays the middle-aged owner/manager of a hotel where he regularly insults his guests, occasionally projecting his own flaws and weakness onto some of them. In one episode, The Waldorf Salad, a rude Basil mocks a couple of guests who tell his wife they love reading the books of Harold Robbins. She tells the couple: “But seriously, though, his men are all so interesting. Ruthless and sexy and powerful.”

What he found was many contradictions: contemporary liberalism in the end forces its adherents to become hypocrites. They adopt one pose in public, but when it comes to what matters most in their own lives—their property, their privacy, and their children—they jettison their liberal principles and embrace conservative ones. In other words, they have mastered Projection when accusing others of what they in fact act out.

Freud, who projected many of his own flaws on rival psychiatrist Carl Jung, visa versa, considered that, in Projection, thoughts, motivations, desires, and feelings that cannot be accepted as one’s own are dealt with by being placed in the outside world and attributed to someone else. What the ego repudiates is split off and placed in another. However, his rival, Jung, wrote: “All projections provoke counter-projection when the object is unconscious of the quality projected upon it by the subject.”

Meanwhile, violent fascist Antifa rioters were on the streets torching dozens of cars (so much for the environment), smashing store windows, physically attacking Trump supporters, and assaulting police horses. The actor James Woods tweeted: “The nails in the ends of their weapons are for stabbing police horses as well as anybody they remotely disagree with.” On Fox News, an Antifa member said even the police horses are racists.

Spiked editor, Brendan O’Neill, says that being anti-fascist means destroying historic monuments, censoring people you don’t like, starting fires on campuses to prevent people from speaking, calling for certain books, protests and flags to be outlawed and referring to everybody by race.

One Antifa protester was freely shouting, “Ban free speech!” The Soviet Russian Gulag prisoner, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, said: “Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.”

The American writer/documentary maker Dinesh D’Souza has recently written a book about leftist lies. He wonders: “Why is it that anti-fascist [Antifa] mobs always engage in the very behavior they are supposedly protesting — fascism?” In his book, The Big Lie (Exposing the Nazi Roots of the Left), D’Souza writes how the Left is attempting to transfer (Projection) blame to us for their crimes. He says: “The American Left’s thuggery, censorship and intimidation tactics are part of a deliberate effort to subvert the democratic process just as Hitler and Mussolini did.”

Projection or hypocrisy, call it what you will, go way back to ancient Greece and beyond. Did the prominent Athenians who condemned Socrates project many of their own corrupted views on the youth of Athens? And while Socrates might have accused these elders of ignorance, he was also aware of his own ignorance on certain topics.

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