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ABSTRACT
Projection does not reliably serve cognition; it all too often contributes to failures of knowledge. Our projecting not only imaginatively misrepresents the world by attributing a feature of ourself to it. In doing so it can misrepresent us as lacking that feature. It is an act of the imagination which re-locates unwanted attributes into a motivated misrepresentation which distorts our grasp of reality and of ourselves. The imaginative act itself is not consciously intended so that we take the resulting picture at face value, despite the distortion. Without a strong reason to question this misperception the projection remains undetected and the misrepresentation affects our relations to others. Projection serving motivated self-deception thus evades correction. Realistic self-knowledge becomes possible through psychoanalysis when the patient's projections are received by the analyst as communications impinging on her capacity for sympathy. I show how the psychology of sympathy we find in Hume and Smith provides a philosophical frame of reference for understanding this interaction between sympathy and projection. I bring sympathy together with contemporary Kleinian psychoanalytic theory to explain how psychoanalytic interpretation engages with this interaction to reduce the effects of projection and enable a self-knowledge grounded in the subject's own experience of herself.
Acknowledgements
The work going into this paper has benefited from discussions with David Bell, Damien Freeman, Elisa Galgut, Richard Gipps, and Adam Leite. The author would like to thank the two anonymous peer reviewers for their constructive criticism of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 This can be very considerable; in my paper I detail how projection exerts control and coercion over others. But the psychological and social consequences of treating others as the bad self one wishes to disown go far beyond this.
2 See Nichols, ‘Introduction’ (Nichols Citation2006) for a summary view of the cognitive ‘propositional’ imagination.
3 Sympathy is distinct from compassion; Smith writes ‘Pity and compassion are words appropriated to signify our fellow-feeling with the sorrows of others. Sympathy … may [now] be made use of to denote our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever’ (Citation[1759] 2002, 13).
4 I leave aside the detail of Kornblith's argument, which I take to succeed on its own terms.
5 Kornblith references DSM III-R (1987): in the current version, DSM 5 (2013), the criteria (unchanged) for paranoid personality disorder include: global mistrust and suspicion of others’ motives; unfounded belief that others are using, lying to, or harming them; interpretation of ambiguous or benign remarks as hurtful or threatening; holding grudges; believing their reputation or character are being assailed by others. This occupies one end of a spectrum of paranoid thought, with clinical delusional disorder characterised by persecutory ideas and fears of harm at the other end: see for example Freeman (Citation2016).
6 Kornblith opts for a causal explanation of paranoid personality; while conceding that ‘we don't fully understand’ the conditions that produce the range of ordinary self-misunderstanding (60) he does not engage with psychoanalysis’ claim that paranoia originates in defensive projection.
7 These include: social isolation; sensory impairment (notoriously, deafness), dementia, impaired cerebral function, fatigue, hypoglycaemia, recreational and pharmaceutical drugs, cognitive deficits including memory impairment.
8 According to the psychoanalytic theory of defence, opacity arises as the systematic unavailability of the mental content of belief or desire when there is a primary gain; a functional advantage to fixing the mental state in such a way that it does not disrupt mental life. [The locus classicus is Freud’s 1911 ‘Schreber case’ (Freud Citation[1911] 1981), but its speculations, inviting challenge, reduce its usefulness].
9 Davidson (Citation1982) argues that self-deceptive reasoning is non-rationally produced by causal factors, being explained in terms of the partitioning of the mind into ‘quasi-autonomous’ rational structures that can enter into non-logical causal relations (304–305) and that these are both ‘very general features of psychoanalytic theory’ and ‘will be found in any theory that sets itself to explain irrationality’.
10 This insulation of self-deception from reality is also seen with other personality disorders; the narcissistic personality's self-aggrandisement, especially, provides a warrant for discounting the views of others. The extreme resistance to correction seen in delusion is thought to reside in more than self-deception, in organic causes or in the actuality of abnormal experience or emotion (Mele Citation2009). However, there is evidence that delusional thinking can be reduced by addressing cognitive and environmental factors that maintain it (Freeman et al. Citation2019, Citation2021).
11 The model accommodates the operation of biases, leading to self-deception, from systemic, motivational and affective factors deriving from faulty learning or the cognitive environment (see Mele Citation2009; Bentall et al. Citation2001). Bias from motivational and affective factors include effects of desires and value-preferences, and the affective valence of mood states and self-esteem. System factors in information processing such as overload or fatigue, or motivation by intolerance of uncertainty, may produce effort-saving or uncertainty-reducing short-cuts in reasoning. Bias may also come from ‘implicit’ knowledge when beliefs that are held unreflectively, or are not well systematised, nevertheless enter into cognitive processing.
12 The overall affective positive-negative valence of the set of self-representations will itself affect the valency and direction of attributions, which in turn will create or alter self-representations within the set (see, e.g, Bentall et al. Citation2001, 254ff).
13 Biases from both disconfirmation and epistemological impulsivity from a variety of causes are also found in deluded patients (Bentall Citation2003, 322ff). Low self-esteem, though not consistently found in paranoia, may be responsible for negative external attribution in paranoid subjects (Bentall Citation2003, 331ff).
14 To the extent the mechanisms producing it are held to be cognitively modifiable, paranoid thinking should also be amenable to modification. One question for the model is then, how far it offers a way to modify the recalcitrance of paranoid ideation. Although cognitive behaviour therapy has been shown to reduce delusions of persecution in patients with paranoid psychosis (Freeman Citation2021) mitigating paranoid thinking in ordinary individuals is limited by their suspicion of others and denial of symptomatically abnormal thought in themselves.
15 This agreement is unsurprising in view of philosophical acknowledgements noted of convergence with psychoanalytic thought and ordinary psychology by, for example, Kornblith (Citation1998) and Davidson (Citation1982).
16 This might be achievable by other, more cognitively oriented therapeutic means, but if it were that would not invalidate the psychoanalytic insight so much as endorse it as something else which, post-Freud, we have come to accept.
17 Ultimately the question is one of theoretical adequacy to the phenomena; the psychoanalytic approach presented is intended as offering an explanation in a different philosophical tradition of thought, broadly termed humanistic, about the mind and the nature of the imagination, which does not readily lend itself to empirical generalisations in science [see, e.g. Strawson (Citation[1974] 2008); Williams (Citation1973)].
18 Etymologically, projection is the action of throwing outward or forward; in psychology the throwing is metaphorical, denoting the figurative re-location of subjective experience to the objective world.
19 ‘Ego’ is used interchangeably with ‘self’.
20 Price (Citation1992) is the exception in philosophy. Bentall, a psychologist, finds a polemical use for the concept to defend himself from the criticism by established psychiatry (with its Kraepelinian origins) that his theory is unscientific. He writes, ‘as it is clearly unscientific to cling to the Kraepelinian paradigm, which enjoys almost no evidential support, these kinds of criticisms amount to what Freudians sometimes call projection (the tendency to attribute one's own faults to other people)’ (Citation2003, 495).
21 Bias here is preferential cognitive focus, the simulator selecting her own (ego-centric) point of view on the simulated situation rather than that of the person being simulated; thereby introducing her own state of mind into her (mis)perception of the other.
22 Hume's metaphors still do not tell us how the gilding and staining come about, nor how the ‘new creation’ is raised. Peter Millican (in discussion) sees Hume as condemning projection as mis-attribution.
23 This is one of the insights from Freud that have entered ordinary psychology.
24 I argue (Braddock Citation2019) that ordinary empathy is no more than the normally occurring functioning of sympathy in conjunction with projection.
25 ‘Feeling’ here stands for ‘sentiment’, the term these philosophers use to designate a state of mind. Some scholars hold Hume (1739–1740) and Smith (Citation[1759] 2002) to differ with respect to whether the feelings imagined are those of the sympathetic imaginer or of the other. I do not engage with this debate here, nor with other differences between their views, as not germane to my argument; the two philosophers agree on the centrality of sympathetic imagining in our knowledge of others.
26 Following Gardner (Citation1995a, 212) we may analyse the interaction between (projecting) subject A and recipient B into formal (i, ii) and material (iii, iv) conditions, where S is mental state: i. A is not in S and B is in S ii. B were not in S, A would be in S iii. A is not in S because A sympathetically detects* that B is in S iv. B is in S because B sympathetically responds* to A's enactment of placing S in B * ‘sympathetically responds/detects’ replaces Gardner's term ‘unconscious sensitivity’.
27 The analyst is ‘she’ and the patient is ‘he’ (the reverse in Bell and Leite's case example).
28 Such ‘probing’ projection coupled with sympathy is epistemically unreliable. What A sympathetically reads as B's emotion may be being elicited by A's projection. It is also ethically problematic, since A may use his sympathetically acquired knowledge of B to actively control B by projection.
29 Projective identification (see Braddock Citation2019) is a concept of Kleinian object-relations theory.
30 This excludes: non-specific effects of the working alliance, unconditional positive regard, or practices involving warmth, expressed understanding and other forms of ‘empathising’.
31 Different schools’ formulations of therapeutic change are discussed by Kernberg (Citation2007). Gabrinetti and Ozler (Citation2017) compare American intersubjective psychoanalysis with Smith on sympathy, when the spectator and observed other ‘place themselves in each other's situations through imagination the spectator imagines what the agent would be feeling, the agent imagines how the spectator would be responding’. Like Bell and Leite (327) they see the relation as symmetrical and dialectical.
32 Strachey's description, given in terms of a Freudian psychology of the ego and its functions, anticipates the Kleinian object-relational analysis in which part-objects produced in the splitting that accompanies projection, are bearers of the patient's unwanted attributes. The resulting projective identification is characterised by confusion over who is ‘now doing what to whom’ (Heimann Citation1956, 306). Non-Kleinian theory explains this clinical picture differently; as suggested by a reviewer, the patient's state of mind could be formulated as a narcissistic phantasy of self-other (con)fusion in defence against painful (mutual) dependency; in such a theoretical framework projection has less of a role to play.
33 My explanation dispenses with imaginative identification; this is explored elsewhere (Braddock Citation2011, Citation2012).
34 Thus addressing what is missing in ‘What is it like to be me?’, although Kornblith is not cited.
35 In this case example the patient is ‘she’.
36 This is not circular: the analyst's experiential knowledge of her patient comes from her acquired ability to hold together her own perspective and her experience from her patient's perspective all within the scope of her sympathetic imagining in the countertransference.
37 As objected by a reviewer, if according to realism there is a fact of the matter about what the patient is like to which he does not have cognitive access, then Jack does not come to know something previously unknown as a result of interpretation, but only comes to possess what is already a known fact about himself, from a new, ‘second order’ position on himself achieved through interpretive re-framing. However, in Bell and Leite's terms, this self-knowledge is not yet experiential; it remains to be integrated with the patient's first-personal, subjective experience in a particular way. Interpretation achieves this through the mitigation of projection, enabling the mutual sympathy in which patient and analyst come to agree on what they are sharing as the same experience, when each recognises in themself what the other is feeling. When self-knowledge is experiential in this way, the patient can think about it and decide to consciously accept it as part of himself or act to change it.
38 In insisting on the mutuality of the experience I do not mean to imply that the relation is exclusively one between patient and analyst; the patient comes to see what anyone in the analyst's position, including himself, would see.
39 This is not an anachronistic excursus into the history of philosophy. Hume and Smith are philosophers whose work has undergone extensive critical scrutiny and remains relevant to the empiricist and empirical tradition of philosophical thought today.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Louise Braddock
Louise Braddock is a former psychiatrist with a background in philosophy. She is now an Independent Scholar working on interdisciplinary psychoanalytic thought.