Psychological projection is a theory where people deny their own unpleasant impulses and attributes them to others instead. The document discusses how projection is a common process in everyday life and can contribute to family violence. It provides a brief history of how projection was conceptualized, including early formulations by Freud who believed people projected elements that already slightly existed in others. Projection tends to come out more during times of crisis or in personalities functioning at a primitive level like borderline personality disorder. While projection was used to explain behaviors during the Salem witch trials, some studies criticize Freud's theory and suggest projection is actually a by-product of suppressing thoughts of one's own undesirable traits.
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Psychological projection effect on Family Violence
Psychological projection is a theory where people deny their own unpleasant impulses and attributes them to others instead. The document discusses how projection is a common process in everyday life and can contribute to family violence. It provides a brief history of how projection was conceptualized, including early formulations by Freud who believed people projected elements that already slightly existed in others. Projection tends to come out more during times of crisis or in personalities functioning at a primitive level like borderline personality disorder. While projection was used to explain behaviors during the Salem witch trials, some studies criticize Freud's theory and suggest projection is actually a by-product of suppressing thoughts of one's own undesirable traits.
Psychological projection is a theory where people deny their own unpleasant impulses and attributes them to others instead. The document discusses how projection is a common process in everyday life and can contribute to family violence. It provides a brief history of how projection was conceptualized, including early formulations by Freud who believed people projected elements that already slightly existed in others. Projection tends to come out more during times of crisis or in personalities functioning at a primitive level like borderline personality disorder. While projection was used to explain behaviors during the Salem witch trials, some studies criticize Freud's theory and suggest projection is actually a by-product of suppressing thoughts of one's own undesirable traits.
Abstracted from British Psychological Society magazine
Volume 7, No. 6, 2010,April 12
Psychological projection effect on
Family Violence By : Rin Nohara Psychological projection is a theory in psychology in which humans defend themselves against their own unpleasant impulses by denying their existence while attributing them to others. For example, a person who is habitually rude may constantly accuse other people of being rude. It incorporates blame shifting.
According to some research, the projection of one's negative
qualities onto others is a common process in everyday life
A prominent precursor in the formulation of the projection
principle was Giambattista Vico and an early formulation of it is found in ancient Greek writer Xenophanes, which observed that "the gods of Ethiopians were inevitably black with flat noses while those of the Thracians were blond with blue eyes. In 1841, Ludwig Feuerbach was the first to employ this concept as the basis for a systematic critique of religion. Projection (German: Projektion) was conceptualized by Freud in his letters to Wilhelm Fliess, and further refined by Karl Abraham and Anna Freud. Freud 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 of and placed in another. Freud would later come to believe that projection did not take place arbitrarily, but rather seized on and exaggerated an 1
Abstracted from British Psychological Society magazine
Volume 7, No. 6, 2010,April 12
element that already existed on a small scale in the other
person (The related defence of projective identification difers from projection in that there the other person is expected to become identified with the impulse or desire projected outside, so that the self maintains a connection with what is projected, in contrast to the total repudiation of projection proper. Melanie Klein saw the projection of good parts of the self as leading potentially to over-idealisation of the object Equally, it may be one's conscience that is projected, in an attempt to escape its control: a more benign version of this allows one to come to terms with outside authority
Projection tends to come to the fore in normal people at times of
crisis, personal or political but is more commonly found in the neurotic or psychotic in personalities functioning at a primitive level as in narcissistic personality disorder or borderline personality disorder Carl Jung considered that the unacceptable parts of the personality represented by the Shadow archetype were particularly likely to give rise to projection, both small-scale and on a national/international basis. Marie-Louise Von Franz extended her view of projection, stating that "wherever known reality stops, where we touch the unknown, there we project an archetypal image".Psychological projection is one of the medical explanations of bewitchment used to explain the behavior of the afflicted children at Salem in 1692. The historian John Demos asserts that the symptoms of bewitchment experienced by the afflicted girls were due to the girls undergoing psychological projection of repressed aggressions
Criticism : there is Some studies were critical of Freud's theory.
Research supports the existence of a false-consensus efect whereby humans have a broad tendency to believe that others are similar to themselves, and thus "project" their personal traits onto others. This applies to good traits as well as bad traits
Abstracted from British Psychological Society magazine
Volume 7, No. 6, 2010,April 12
and is not a defense mechanism for denying the existence of the
trait within the self Instead, Newman, Duf, and Baumeister (1997) proposed a new model of defensive projection. In this view, people try to suppress thoughts of their undesirable traits, and these eforts make those trait categories highly accessibleso that they are then used all the more often when forming impressions of others. The projection is then only a by-product of the real defensive mechanism
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