We rarely see the world exactly as it is. We see it through layers of memory, emotion, expectation, and much more.
Assuming we have relatively normal neurophysiology, we pass through the world constantly projecting onto it. Look around you. You’ll see objects or persons.
Consider a stranger sitting across from you in a coffeehouse. Within seconds, you’ve formed impressions about their personality, intentions, perhaps even their politics. You know almost nothing about this person, yet your mind has already constructed a story. You will instinctively evaluate whether they pose a threat to your safety. Other layers of evaluation might include: Are they attractive? Do you wish to engage them in conversation?
What if they wear a MAGA or Democratic Socialists of America T-shirt? This would likely elicit a strong emotional reaction involving both projection and introjection. You take in those T-shirt logos, that’s introjection, and then, within nanoseconds, you project out, “Better avoid him” or “Now, that’s a woman I could speak with.”
If you next turn your gaze to your romantic partner, you instantly see what their clothes represent: He’s off to the gym, the office, or the garden. The idea of the garden fills your mind with memories. How lovely the flowering hydrangea he planted looks! And what about that argument we had over extending the brick patio? That memory triggers one about the dinner party where eight of you sat on the smaller patio enjoying Indian food. Seeing him also elicits the ambivalence normal to us all:
I feel so much love for him, but I also find him disappointing because he dominates conversations and struggles to listen when I talk to him. Oh well…
Now imagine the dining area of your home, perhaps a tiny breakfast nook. The table and the chairs around it elicit other sets of images stacked up like Russian matryoshka dolls. Where you bought the table, the basket holding the napkins, or the table settings resting there all carry memories. There’s that painting of the guy with the tie, picked up on the cheap at a Venice Beach stall in the 1990s.
If you’re there with your partner, the thoughts may start a conversation. “Remember that time we went roller skating on the boardwalk down there? What a deal we got on that painting!” Even though you cannot even prove another person has consciousness, we assume it. Where do these shared images reside? In the ether?
From here, we enter a gray zone. Materialists, who believe that all phenomena consist of “things” or “matter,” reduce these strata to our neurophysiology, which, in turn, can be reduced to biology, chemistry, and physics. They could have it right. Who knows? Quantum mechanics offers nearly perfect mathematical predictions of what happens to matter; and yet, physicists have absolutely no idea as to what makes up matter.
If you drink too much whiskey, or ingest more than 200 micrograms of LSD, these images, and any conversation related to them, will change. Alcohol creates disinhibition by numbing the frontal lobe of the brain. You might just end up telling your partner you hate him or accelerating your sexual attraction to him.
But, here, trouble arises. Idealists, the opposite of materialists, come to the fore. They believe everything started with consciousness. No consciousness, no knowledge. Every single “thing” we know about anything must’ve begun with consciousness, they think. They might find this noteworthy: What about how our projections live on beyond our deaths? Maybe you leave that breakfast nook table to your daughter and son-in-law. Won’t some of its memories carry into their minds? Images of you and your partner already live in everyone you know. Where are they? Materialists think it’s all reducible to matter; idealists think it’s all reducible to consciousness.
Let’s dig deeper into projection. Freudian psychoanalysts think projections emerge from our conscious and unconscious minds1. Carl Jung2, who identified the collective unconscious, thought it also contains universal archetypes. Projections contain more than just your repressed wishes or unacceptable feelings. They also reflect universal patterns of human experience. Where do these live?
You might look at the stranger in the coffeehouse as evil, a projection of your Shadow outward. People who cannot acknowledge their own aggressive, selfish, or destructive impulses may perceive these qualities as pronounced in others. Alternatively, you might project out the Great Mother archetype, causing you to (unfairly) view your partner as an inexhaustible source of comfort, unconditional love, and protection. Or, perhaps, you project the Hero out, leaving you feeling unfairly insecure at the muscular man in running clothes right next to you in the line.
When we are infants and toddlers, we ingest culture like sponges. Artificial intelligence (AI) may have read everything, but it cannot have felt everything. We learn the customs of our era, how to dress, how to behave, how to look both ways before crossing streets. We develop consciousness and unconsciousness; we inherit the collective unconscious from genetics or environment, no one knows.
Again, just where do they live? And what about books, fiction and nonfiction? They live in libraries and in the digital universe. Where did they live over the centuries? Alexander the Great allegedly carried the Iliad with him, believing he had directly descended from Achilles.
The debate between materialists and idealists rages on, with no proof for either view. No one understands matter. And, when it comes to the idealist argument, there is, in fact, no way to prove our brains are simply excellent receptors for a universal consciousness.
The debate leaves us with an enduring mystery, and hardly a new one. Philosophers and theologians have wrestled with these ideas since the dawn of human civilization.
Lest you think Charles Darwin ends his culture-altering* book with any certitude, think not. In the first few sentences of his famous 1859 book, On the Origin of the Species3, he considers any search for its origin:
the mystery of mysteries.
I, for one, vote for embracing the mystery.
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*Freud argued that scientific discovery had inflicted three profound narcissistic wounds on us humans: Copernicus injured us first with his observation that Earth was not the center of the universe. The second wound came from Darwin, who showed we were nothing more than talking monkeys. Freud considered the worst affliction the psychological one: Copernicus and Darwin displaced humanity from its privileged position in the external world; Freud believed psychoanalysis challenged our presumed sovereignty over our own inner world, famously writing:
The ego is not master in its own house4.
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References
Freud, S. (1895). The neuro-psychoses of defense. (Freud, S. (1962). The neuro-psychoses of defence (1894). Standard Edition, 3:41-61.
Von Franz, M.L. (1980). Projection and re-collection in Jungian psychology: Reflections of the soul. New York: Open Court Publishing.
Darwin, C. (1859). On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. New York: John Murray.
Freud, S. (1917). A difficulty in the path of psycho-analysis. Standard Edition, 17:135-144.