King Lear introduces us to a timeless kingdom—and for all practical consideration that means your interior life. If you dream of a kingdom or hear the story of a royal court, it should be understood as your interior court. This concerns the drama that goes on inside you. The niceties and stupidities, the failures and the nobility—all of these are aspects of your own life. Keep in mind that the story of King Lear is your story. We will not review every scene or all the subplots and characters in this complex work, for our intent is not to offer literary criticism but rather to understand contentment.
As the play opens, Lear has decided to give the largest share of the kingdom to the daughter who apparently loves him the most. What a horrible thing to do! This is like insisting that your partner declare how much he or she loves you. At that moment, love flies out the window. If you have to pry the love out of someone, authentic feelings run and hide in that very instant. Love must be freely given.
Lear seems to think that love and contentment are commodities that can be bought with his riches. In our materialistic society, we too are led to believe that everything has its price. But love and contentment are not of the material realm. They are invisible spiritual forces.
The king dismisses everyone who wants him to see reality as it is. His lack of self-awareness also means he can’t accurately judge the intentions of others. He fails to perceive the insincerity and latent cruelty in his two older daughters as well as in the other schemers surrounding him at court.
Each modern “I” can be likened to a little monarch trying to rule its kingdom. Like Lear, when we mix up the “inner” with the “outer,” it is easy to create quite a mess. The first lesson in contentment involves differentiating these two realms—inner and outer. That requires an understanding of projection.
Projection: A Cause for Confusion
Projection is the error of attaching an aspect of your inner life onto someone or something on the outside. This way, you do not have to take responsibility for it. In projecting a disowned part of yourself, you endow other people and things with the power to make you blissful or miserable. Then you turn around and praise or blame the person or situation, while all the while you are reacting to an unconscious, inner part of yourself.
Here are some examples of projection: You are feeling chaotic, so you explode at your co-workers for being disorganized. You dislike your mother’s negativity, it drives you crazy, but you fail to see the ways in which you are negative. It is more convenient to project all the negativity onto her. You admire the strength and confidence of the handsome man who lives across the hall and fantasize that if only he would fall in love with you life would be grand—thus you project your inner strength upon a stranger. You dream of living in another town or a different culture where people never catch a cold, neighbors are always generous and kind, and babies don’t cry; this is projecting your capacity for contentment onto a different place and circumstance. You don’t need to go anywhere to find contentment, but you do need to reel in your projections.
Just like a film projector in a movie theater, your small interior image is projected onto an outer screen. It appears to be an objective fact, and, just as in the movies, it is larger than life, accompanied by strong emotions, dramatic scenes, and twisting plots. Projections change the world into a replica of your own unknown face, involving qualities and emotions that you normally deny in yourself but can plainly see in other people.
Here are two more examples. Suppose your father was a tyrant, and you couldn’t wait to grow up and get away from him. You might in later life project the quality of tyranny upon authority figures such as doctors or bosses and have a lot of trouble relating to them. You also are probably driven by an inner tyrant, a hidden part of yourself that is judgmental, demanding, and never satisfied—but you will tend to see and abhor this quality in others rather than in yourself. It is the last thing you want to believe about yourself, so this inner tyrant is projected.
Or suppose you were always daddy’s special little girl; as an adult, perhaps you are skilled at getting what you want by being admired and adored. You might easily project your benevolent father on others and expect care and safety without careful discrimination. Your own potential for self-care and self-esteem lies undeveloped in your unconscious, and often you probably find yourself vulnerable to and dependent upon men.
Anytime someone is irritating us out of our wits, we can assume that the cause of our irritation does not lie solely in the other person. At the time it seems abundantly clear that the source of our discontent is “out there”—the store clerk who was rude, the unappreciative co-worker, the negative parent, or the self-centered mate. It’s true, the qualities we project can be found “out there”—but they are not a conspiracy to undermine our contentment. Reeling in our projections won’t eliminate stupidity and evil in the world, but it can help us sort out inner and outer realities and thereby eliminate a great deal of discontent.
Try this simple exercise. Think of the person you dislike the most. Make a list of the qualities you abhor about them, such as viciousness, backbiting, meanness, being two-faced, cheap, stingy, and so on. Spend a couple of minutes going through your list with a friend or partner. Describe this hated person. Then go through your list a second time and say, “I am… ” before each quality. Your ego will probably deny it, and you may quickly decide that this is a silly exercise, but if you ponder your list for a while, you might get a glimpse of your own backside.
Everyone projects negative qualities such as laziness, greed, envy, jealousy, scheming, cowardice, fear. We would rather see these qualities in our partners or our neighbors than in ourselves. What is more surprising is that we also project positive qualities. Curiously, people resist the noble aspects of their unconscious even more strenuously than they hide their dark sides.
Reclaiming Your Shadow
Recall that the unconscious is like a great sea from which we have all been born. Jung once defined it as “Everything of which I know, but of which I am not at the moment thinking; everything of which I was once conscious but have now forgotten; everything perceived by my senses, but not noted by my conscious mind; everything which, involuntarily and without paying attention to it, I feel, think, remember, want, and do; all the future things that are taking shape in me and will sometime come to consciousness: all this is the content of the unconscious.”1
The unnoticed, underdeveloped, and unacceptable characteristics in you do not go away; they only collect in the dark corners of your personality like a shadow. They build up energy until they have an opportunity to explode upon the scene. When they have been hidden long enough, they take on a life of their own as projections.
Every person and every civilization has a shadow, and that hidden inner reality is seen through projection. What makes projection so difficult to correct is that it takes place unconsciously. To say that a projection is unconscious means that it really is unconscious—that is, outside your conscious control. As a result, you don’t make projections so much as meet up with them.
Are Traffic Lights Conspiring Against You?
Here’s a useful way to understand projection and its role in undermining contentment. What is the substance of a traffic light? The word substance originally meant the spirit behind the material, that which fashions the traffic light, or the spirit of the traffic light. Somehow the meaning of substance has taken a 180-degree turn in our modern understanding. People have come to think that substance means the material in the traffic light—some colored, glass, metal wire, paint, and plastic. However, the spirit behind the traffic light is a command to stop, slow down, or go. This bit of reality is pretty simple—stop, slow down, or go.
Our projections on the traffic light, however, are much more complicated. You might see that the light is red and think, “Oh, I have to stop again. I’m late. Is fate against me?” Or, you might think, “This damn stoplight is thwarting my progress; why are all these cars in my way?” Many people seem to think, “The light is yellow; this is my chance to speed up and get ahead of everyone.” Or maybe, “Yippee, the light’s green! I must be living right.” All kinds of “I”-centered judgments sneak into this experience, judgments that have nothing to do with the simple reality of stop, slow down, or go. (By the way, as an experiment, for one week the authors carefully observed traffic light encounters and found them to be about equally divided between the colors.)
If you want to see projections in action, just observe yourself in traffic for one day. At each traffic light notice how you attach a projection to the simple reality of stop, slow down, or go.
If a simple traffic light can create so much emotion, what happens in more complex interactions? Consider how much of your day is filled with negative and positive projections distorting your perceptions of the world. When the phone rings or a letter arrives in the mail or you are asked to attend a meeting, do you project qualities—positive or negative—that color your experience? Projections keep us embroiled in illusions of our own making. In Eastern spiritual traditions this is called maya, a limited form of consciousness.
When projection is at work, our response is typically: (1) emotional, (2) compulsive, and (3) out of proportion to the reality of the situation. Other people often sense when we are projecting our own hidden qualities upon the world. Unfortunately, we are usually the last to know.
Tending to “What Is”
How can you “reel in” projections and stop blaming the world for your discontent? A good start is to honestly state “what is.” Call upon the Cordelia inside you to provide an honest assessment of reality. Sit down and write a “what is” letter. This exercise is not about stating what once was, what might be, or what ought to be. Just state what is. The first attempt at such a letter is almost always too abstract. You will need to be specific. You can’t just say, “I’m discontented because my life is a big mess.” Try to avoid theory, idealization, and blame. Just state what is. What’s the reality of my situation? What’s really true of my life here and now? Contentment grows out of the circumstances of life as you find it, in the very place where you currently exist.
When you sincerely state “what is” in any given situation, a mysterious thing happens. “What is” is made conscious, and you are then able to see the next “what is.” It becomes clear what you must do next. You do that thing and ask yourself again, “What is?” Then, you do the next right thing. In this stepwise manner you can gradually get your life moving in a positive direction. If you operate out of “what is” instead of living mired in your projections, you can begin to work your way out of any dilemma. When reality is honored, you are speaking from a divine place.
A traffic light is not a conspiracy to frustrate you or steal your contentment, and neither is the reality in which you currently find yourself. It just is. Imagine approaching each circumstance in your day as a simple bit of reality without the projections. Such a day would have a reasonable chance of bringing you more contentment. The more present and aware you are to what is, the greater the possibilities for contentment.
A Special Kind of Projection: Romantic Love
Nearly everyone has had the experience of falling in love—that warm, engaged rapture that lifts you about a foot off the ground. When “in love,” you think of the beloved constantly. You can’t get enough time together. Even sleep gives no rest. The object of your affection seems heavenly and can do no wrong. This involves a special kind of projection that creates a great deal of disappointment and disillusionment for modern people.
As we all know, the intensity of this “in love” experience changes and ebbs with time. You start to see that “Prince Charming” or “Sleeping Beauty” has some serious flaws. When the intense “in-loveness” starts to change, many people feel somehow betrayed. A James Thurber cartoon captures this moment with genius when a middle-aged man is replying to his wife, “Well, who took the magic out of our marriage?” It is so easy to blame another for the effects of our own projections.
A romantic projection is too much for any human to carry. Whether it lasts for a month, six months, or seven years, eventually it comes crashing down. The wife says, “You are not the white knight like I thought,” and the husband says, “You are not the princess I married.”
Love cannot be reduced to a psychological mechanism, but it is useful to think of infatuation, that “falling in love” experience, as a force by which we reach out for our own missing qualities. We project our capacity for greater wholeness upon someone else. Recall past loves, asking yourself what you loved about them and what quality they possessed that you wanted to merge with. This will tell you what aspect of your unconscious was yearning to be made conscious.
When a projection no longer holds up against reality, we have a wonderful opportunity to become more whole. For example, it is only after a romantic projection starts to break that a sustainable, human-sized love becomes possible. Human-sized love is based upon knowing a person as she or he really is, not grasping for your own unrealized qualities. Reality is far nobler than any projection.
Differentiating the Inner and Outer Realms
Unfortunately, when reality can no longer sustain our projections, we generally react badly, blaming others for deceiving us or lamenting that the world has not lived up to our expectations. We create embarrassing scenes, slam doors, and shout recriminations. We may withdraw into a shell of our own making—disillusioned and cynical. We would rather cling to a projection than take back our own inner potential. In reclaiming a projection, we are faced with the task of dealing with all the unfairness and devilry that we have attributed to others. If we were to reclaim our projections, then we would no longer have anybody to complain about, nobody to improve or punish, nobody we could blame for our discontent. We also would no longer have anybody to save us, nobody to worship, nobody to look to for our contentment.
In Shakespeare’s story, after Cordelia vows to love Lear with the respect due a father, the angry king declares, “Better thou / Hadst not been born than not to have pleased me better.” He reacts to Cordelia’s simple and honest declaration of “what is” with all the passion of a scorned lover. Please note that there is no queen in Shakespeare’s play. A mature partner is missing in this court, and Lear lacks warmth and feeling. Instead of projecting his missing qualities on a queen, Lear places them on his daughters. The king’s capacities for relatedness, love, and compassion are all sadly underdeveloped. He wants to command these inner qualities, to acquire them in the outer world like a possession.
When Cordelia refuses to carry the king’s projection, he explodes. His response reveals that a projection has been at work: it is emotional, compulsive, and out of proportion to the reality of the situation.
Lear then switches allegiance from Cordelia to his other daughters, which creates even more trouble. Many modern people move from one target for their projection to another, thinking they only have to find the “right one”—the right person, job, situation, or purchase. This is the painful cycle of “contentment will come just as soon as.” It takes considerable suffering before Lear is willing to stop blaming others. Unfortunately, it seems that we too will endure all kinds of suffering before we are willing to attend to our inner world.
Projection is a muddling of inner and outer realities. Based on this confusion, we look for contentment “out there.” Outer realities have their own intrinsic value. It takes honesty, humility, and courage to reel in our projections, but doing so will bring the objective beauty and value of the outer world into better focus. In differentiating the inner and outer realms, we have a chance to grow psychologically by moving beyond the adolescent quality of viewing the world as a reflection of our own hidden self.
Dangers of Collective Projection
Just as individuals project unconscious parts of who they are, social groups also suffer from this process. Collective projections of negative qualities result in cultural, racial, and religious prejudices and conflicts. All scapegoating is due to projection.
When society worships consciousness and refuses the unconscious, some of the hidden residue appears as hatred, violence, and the other tragedies that fill the morning newspapers. World War II provided many examples of negative projection. One of the most highly civilized nations on earth, Germany, fell into the idiocy of projecting its virulent collective shadow onto the Jewish people. The world had never seen the equal of this mass destruction and carnage.
An entire generation may live a modern, civilized life without ever touching much of its unconscious nature. Then, predictably, it breaks loose in a war or some other form of destruction. We have seen this quite recently in the Balkans and in Rwanda, where former neighbors slaughter each other. Each time this occurs we wonder how such behavior could occur among civilized people. A greater focus on rationality is not the solution, as the history of the twentieth century so sadly proves. The more one-sided we become in our consciousness, the more we are subject to eruptions from the unconscious.
When asked late in his life if civilization would survive, Jung replied that he hoped it would if only enough people would take responsibility for their own consciousness. The repair of our fractured world must begin with individuals who have the insight and courage to reel in their projections.
1C. G. Jung, Collected Works (New York: Bollingen Foundation), 8:185.