My question to you is this...what is being projected? Is it something that the knower thinks is true?
My definition for 'truth' is in the everyday, "street" sense...it is any factual statement you might make with any amount of seriousness. So when we project our unconscious maps something that is partly of an inner kind of truth onto something of an outer kind of truth and our consciousness does not properly distinguish between the two: the inner and the outer.
Also, when I think of Jung's four functions of consciousness I think of them as four functions of 'truth'. There are perceptive truths and judging truths.
Sensation: I saw that basketball, it was not out of bounds!
Intuition: I think the referee has it in for that player and that is why he called it out of bounds.
Feeling: That ref needs to get a life.
Thinking: Isn't it true that if the ball doesn't touch the ground, then it isn't considered out of bounds?
Each of these statements implies what I would call a sense of the truth although I would argue that each statement derives its fundamental sense of truth from a different cognitive function. It is from this belief that I derive the idea that our truth isn't a capital 'T' truth but four 't' truths (the four conscious functions). Each function is a non-perfect system of its own for determining truth and these systems may produce conflicting truths within or between individual knowers. Even one function can entertain a paradox or contradiction within its own scope. But between modes conflicting opinions aren't so much paradoxical as they are mutually incomprehensible as they are constructed with different building blocks (conscious functions).
Chris, I don't think it is useful, though, to map "truths" to functions like this (ignoring for the moment that I still resist the Jungian notion of functions). The only way that the Jungian functions can have a "cognitive" or naturalistic meaning and not a purely metaphorical and symbolic meaning is as something like "cognitive nodes". By which I mean, they do not have "truths" (fully constructed perceptions or ideas) to offer, only partial ways of perceiving meant to be combined into a
construct of perception.
If (for the sake of argument) it is possible to categorize people into personality types based on which functions they favor as data-providers for their constructions, we should still remember that
all these cognitive functions are being used to construct a perception, but they are being filtered with a specific bias. In reality, of course, our bias filters are very personal and complex, having been constructed by more than merely four functions.
What we should be cautious of when contemplating individuals' personal truths, opinions, and beliefs is the relativization of what is. Yes, we all have limitations to our perception of the actual, but we shouldn't confuse this with there being no actual . . . even in matters of psychology. The actual Truth may be more complex than our capacity to deal with it can handle, but constructing the actual is not a matter of either/or. The accuracy of our constructions is a matter of degree. If we don't acknowledge that some constructions or opinions are more accurate than others, than we flirt with intellectualist nihilism . . . a denial of the real. That kind of college-age philosophical play that urges us to ask things like, "If a tree falls in the woods and there's no one to hear it, does it make a sound?"
This sort of relativizing is more indicative of the adolescent ego wallowing in the illusion of its own power. That which is not perceived does not exist. Egotism, anthropomorphism. "Perception creates the world . . . not the perceiver's world, but THE world."
Of course there is a high degree of relativism in the worlds we construct and live in . . . but these constructions have to have some degree of accuracy, or they cannot help the organism survive the material environment. The more accurate an individual's constructions of world and other, (generally speaking) the more adaptable they will be. There are numerous exceptions to this, but not enough to negate it by any means. That is, some degree of self-deception and rationalization can serve as a useful buffer against despair . . . and there is no doubt that our species' believing has a lot of arbitrary rationalization to it . . . while still often being adaptable (depending on the environment being adapted to). So, if we are trying to survive in Antarctica and it's 30 below zero, believing that the moon will warm and sustain us is not going to result in very effective reproduction. But if an arbitrary or inaccurate belief is either not harmful to survival and fitness or actually (albeit indirectly) promotes survival and fitness, then we can believe away unimpeded and without concern for the actual.
My guess is that perceptual accuracy in our species is also greatly stimulated by the complexity and importance of our sociality. As I discussed extensively in my previous post, our projective consciousness is a peacock's tail of a trait . . . and this indicates that the development of the trait was enormously important to our evolutionary fitness. It seems reasonable to me to guess that this evolutionary arms race was created more or less entirely
within human societies. That is, there are many ways to reinforce your reproductive success if you are a human . . . and having a strong and accurate theory of mind is undoubtedly one of those. Big muscles and nice curves go a long way, but the individuals who get to mate the most are the ones who can appeal to the other's psychology (whether honestly or dishonestly). Such appeals would be easier to achieve the more accurate one's theory of mind or construction of the other's thought process is (again, generally speaking). Just think of how hapless we can be in romance when our understanding of the opposite sex is very limited. And the goal of sex (evolutionarily speaking) is not pleasure, but reproduction. We are not only driven to reproduce, but to reproduce children who also stand a good chance of reproductive success.
So we are driven to perceive with a significant degree of accuracy if not with perfect accuracy. I would argue that the degree of accuracy with which we need to perceive and construct the actual is greatly affected and determined by our specific environment. The tribal, pre-modern environment didn't require "positivistic science" for survival. But the modern, diverse, global environment places a much, much greater demand on information evaluation and discrimination. Information is effectively discriminated and evaluated with a more accurate theory of mind. We must be able to determine whether the other is trying to manipulate us (or maybe doing so unconsciously). Theory of mind is all about motive perception in the other. Know the motive, know/predict the behavior. All of our relationships and social transactions are dependent upon this.
This is in no way relative. It not Your Truth/My Truth or Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus. Accuracy matters, the actual and our ability to perceive it accurately are extremely important to our survival.
I suspect that projection mainly operates via the less developed conscious functions for the individual in question. The person who has developed a given conscious function for which the knower has inferior functioning, may be prone to an unconscious identification as that person invigorates the knower's unconscious via that undeveloped function.
. . .
If one uses one or more conscious functions in a focused, self-consistent way one can probably start to differentiate the outer fact from the inner one. If one develops the inferior function that is "carrying" the projection then it may drain the projection of its energy.
My feeling is that it is less a matter of functions or typologies and more a matter of specific complexes. More personal, less categorical. We can all construct a "type" of person (even an opposite type) reasonably well . . . and sometimes this is the very problem. Real personalities are much more complex. But we resort to greater and greater degrees of typing as the other being perceived seems increasingly alien to us. The more general (and generally alien) our constructions, the more the flood gates of our shadow projection open up. We lose discrimination and the complex subtlety of intuition. To construct an Other as a type is to fail to construct them as a human being. A type of person has a simplistic and fairly linear thought process that can be easily predicted using generic causality. When we project shadow, we always assume that the recipient of the projection is thinking or behaving in a causal way. X motivates Y. And often enough, we all behave within the confines of simple logic (even if that logic is also "irrational" or maladaptive).
As one who has been on the receiving end of more than his fair share of shadow projections, I feel I can pretty accurately and honestly say that the most consistent thing about these projections is that they never came anywhere near grasping my real motivations. They always, very drastically reduced the complexity of my motivations, my mind or intentionality . . . sometimes even to the degree than some behavior or expression of mine that was perceived as alien was simply reduced to "bad" or malicious. The fact that, although not lacking in common human maliciousness, my "type" of personality is far too inclined to feel terribly guilty and fall into self-punishment rather than actually turning wholly and overtly malicious, never seems to occur to others inclined toward the torches and pitchforks approach.
Although my personality is constructed with a special and very complicated relationship to shadow projection (scapegoat complex) compared to the average person, I think it's worth using my experience as an example, because I have always been an "equal opportunity offender". Intuitives, sensates, thinkers, feelers . . . poets, engineers, anal-rententives, anal-expulsives, men, women, marmosets . . . it makes no difference. I've bugged them all. And I didn't bug them all because I am a highly developed intuitive. There are many, more-subtle ways to be "different".
One of the key aggravations of my personality is simply a common effect of doing a lot of shadow work. In shadow work, we don't so much "develop our inferior functions" as begin to relate to parts of ourselves that at first seemed (and maybe are/were) dangerous and unseemly. An individual may not want to relate much to another individual who, let's say, performs autopsies or prepares corpses for funerals. It's a taboo for some people . . . and it used to be much more severe. Just as women menstruating were once considered taboo (by men) or "rebuking the gods" was tabooed, or ten thousand other things. Many of these things are tabooed because cultures and individuals have projected mana into them, "stranger mana". With that projection, we agree not to look below the surface of the other. We see only an act, a behavior, a costume.
Sometimes these stranger mana projections have biological motivators (incest, murder, etc.) . . . but many times these taboos cluster around the totemic lies we tell ourselves in order to continue believing in our sense of self, in our validity (or in the validity of our tribe's dogmas), in our gods and protectors and beautiful defenses. We could say that these things also have biological motivations behind them (albeit much more arbitrary ones) . . . the primary motivation being tribal cohesion. But often enough, the things we are most afraid of are those things that can radically challenge our constructions of selfhood (whether positively or negatively, it doesn't matter). Fairly often, we will refuse to relate to other people who do not construct or perceive us within a pretty close range of the way we want to be perceived and constructed. And much of the time this is necessary.
But it also means (to the extent we do this) that we may have little chance of growing. People who don't construct us the way we would like to be constructed can disturb us, but they are also the only ones who can expand our worlds. Their constructions may even be "wrong" or pretty far off . . . but they still can be useful to us, because they help us realize that there are other ways of being, that we are, the sense of self that we maintain is, arbitrary and plastic. The people that can deeply affect us are the ones that acknowledge our plasticity. Such people say to us, "You can be this or you can be that, and I will relate to you in a way that accepts either or both."
But we can fall in love with fantasies of our selfhood in which we imagine that we "are what we are", that we are strictly defined, that we are such and such a type of person. This fantasy may even include the feeling that one's ego is not constructed or in a constant process of forming and revising itself . . . but is "the Truth", a definite thing. Whether it is others who project shadow onto us or others who have managed to construct or intuit our potential to be more than what we are, ultimately makes no difference. We are equally bothered by both most of the time. In fact, in my experience, I've come to feel that people are more bothered and afraid of their potentials to grow and evolve than they are of projections that reduce them to less than what they know they are.
Whether we project onto the other who constructs us differently than we construct ourselves an initiator or healer (i.e., one who is willing to accompany us in a process of rebuilding ourselves) or a violator and villain is sometimes merely a matter of our attitudes toward change. We can even reformulate our identities in (often, but not always, opposing) relationship to an antagonist. We tend to think it is generally a good thing to "love others for who they are" . . . but sometimes such love is too strict and can be imprisoning when we are ready to change. To love the whole person is to love or accept them for themselves with a high degree of plasticity thrown in. That is, we are all more than fixed ego alone. The more fixity we hold to, the more life and otherness seems to be threatening. Or, as an old poem of mine once put it: "Things that just lie around have a way of vanishing."
That poem is actually nicely pertinent, is all about projection, ego fixity, and the shadow . . . so I will leave off with it.
Nightlife
Dear whoever you are,
I’m writing this letter because . . .
I really just don’t know anymore,
maybe I just shouldn’t get up in the middle of the night
and sit back on my recliner in total darkness
not watching but listening
to things going on on my porch, to noises outside my house.
It all starts out very quiet, and it really is late,
but with time things start happening,
poppings and crackings and a scratching and muffled voices
from the dark bedrooms of neighbors.
I imagine I know what they look like inside, those bedrooms.
They are all red, I’m sure—
red velvet drapes
deep violent red carpets.
I don’t know,
the children must have awakened them.
Those children.
All day I’ll sit on my porch
and the children are misbehaving,
have found something sharp and are cutting things—
furniture in the house or the curtains or bed sheets or something,
cutting into tree trunks, into table legs, into door jambs . . .
always the act of cutting engineering itself
into a mind inside the mind.
Those children won’t be good.
I’ve been living alone for a while now,
I don’t know.
All day I’ll sit on my porch in my chair and my hands
must have something,
something to clutch or tap fingers on . . .
or else I can’t be out there.
Dear acquaintance,
I don’t know how you’ve been, but as for me,
well, things here are the same.
I can’t seem to get going—
so what else is new?
At night I sit in my chair most of the time,
it’s a recliner, I got it used and put it by the front window
where all the light comes in in the morning.
Recently I went to a flea market and got an old straight-edged razor for two bucks.
Just to hold one of those things,
I don’t know.
It seems sinister in a weird way.
What if I’m holding a murder weapon?
For that and for other reasons
I haven’t been able to put it down.
I feel compelled, mysteriously,
to keep my eye on it.
If a razor has a mind it has a purpose.
Such things need someone to watch over them.
Sharp things have a way of vanishing.
Dear concerned listener,
Please rest assured,
immediately after this letter is finished
it will all be over, and then we can simply go back home.
I feel like I’m not making sense. I feel . . .
is that difficult for you? It seems to me somehow sinister.
I don’t know.
Out on the porch, out there, and something is scratching
out there, out there on the porch with my razor.
I believe I left it there, purely by accident, all through the night.
It’s been sitting there on the arm of the chair on the porch waiting,
the night, I’m afraid, will not be good, it won’t be good,
has been known to use it to cut things, the night
has been misbehaving, won’t be good,
is a wicked child, cuts things . . .
put it away!
And really, when you look into it, deep into the blade,
there it is, the night, already cutting—
and children harm things with sharp blades
children know better than we do that sharp things cut
and do not just lie around.
Things that just lie around have a way of vanishing.
Dear friend,
Do not be alarmed,
I have borrowed your razor.
I say borrowed, but it seemed . . . I do not wish
to be presumptuous . . .
that it was left there for me,
that you wished me to have it.
If I am mistaken
just please tell me
and I will return it to you
with my sincerest apologies.
Love, me
PS
The thing you said was missing has been found.
Go back to bed now,
we’ll discuss this in the morning.