16
It’s All a Dream
Depth Approaches to Understanding and Withdrawing Projection

Jeremy Taylor

In Jironet and Stein’s essay, unconscious wisdom is an asset leaders tap to their advantage. However, the work of the unconscious also can distance us from reality and undermine our relationships with others. Sometimes we think we are listening, but really we are just projecting our own ideas or fears onto situations and groups. People project onto others all the time, particularly when stressed or fearful. As an example, at the University of Maryland, where I taught, two different leadership classes of executives unconsciously ascribed higher status to the second-semester class, acting this out in rather exaggerated forms, even though they had similar positions in the larger world and were only a semester apart in the program. Clearly, they were projecting status differences onto one another that were not based on fact, and it impeded their ability to share insights collaboratively. In the essay that follows, Jeremy Taylor shares essential knowledge about how to recognize and withdraw projection proactively so that possibilities can emerge that allow problems to be solved, alliances forged, and visions implemented.

Our world is increasingly divided by differences of culture, religion, and ideology—differences and divisions that are ironically made all the more intense and inescapable by our increasingly globalized economy and expanding information technologies. The intense struggles between and among groups of mutually unacceptable others not only jeopardize our collective growth and development, but also the wars they generate imperil the economy, the environment, and the lives of those touched—and potentially, when we consider widespread nuclear capability, our survival.

In the face of these realities, one of the most essential tasks of leadership at all levels today is to become more consciously aware of our instinctive, unconscious mistrust, fear, and dislike of these archetypical “others” and, in that process, to come to see both them and ourselves more clearly. This task becomes all the more urgent the more we engage in the globalization of business and shared security concerns.

Our reconciliation of these hostilities is directly linked to a greater self-awareness of our instinctive propensity to fear and reject the archetypal, unconscious “other” (the universal, ever-repeating, unconscious pattern Carl Jung termed “the Shadow”), and our ability to reconcile our own, previously unconscious, fears and longings. Our chances of survival and healthy development are increased dramatically when we look within—particularly at the parts of ourselves that seem other in our initial encounters with them.

The collective world of violent strife and global-ideological turmoil and the individual world of intimate personal struggle and disappointment in relationships may seem at first glance to be totally separate. But in fact, they are both generated by the same interior patterns of un-reflective enmity, intolerance, and misunderstanding. At the unconscious level, the hidden factors that drive collective, international, political-ideological-economic-ecological strife are the same as the unconscious factors that twist and cripple our personal relationships and frustrate our individual longings and desires. We encounter the same unconscious thoughts, fears, and desires when we struggle with our personal dilemmas as we do when we try to confront the necessity of pacific change and reconciliation in the outer world. The same unconscious patterns of projection that we encounter in our individual, day-to-day lives drive and enflame our collective struggles with other nations and societies.

No matter how these conflicts are commonly conceived and presented, the violent, counterproductive, pain-filled situations we create at both the collective and personal levels are not the result of conscious choice and sober consideration. They are shaped by predominantly unconscious energies and patterns of projected perception. The seemingly separate realms of collective strife and personal struggle are united by the unconscious archetypal energies and patterns that energize and drive them both.

Our ubiquitous problems stemming from counterproductive communication and failed mutual understanding regularly lead us to horrible violence at both the personal and intercommunal levels. They are outward manifestations of internal, unconscious energies. The problem with the unconscious is that it really is unconscious. It influences and shapes our waking lives without our even knowing it in the moments when it’s happening.

Leaders and those they lead may honestly believe that they are acting rationally, and that they have no other choice but to respond to particular circumstances with the decisive force of physical, emotional, economic, and religious violence. However, the deeper truth of the matter is that the situations that regularly lead us to these thoughts, and the destructive actions that grow from them, are the results of irrational interior processes that are regularly hidden from our conscious view.

In fact, the miseries of our personal lives—the hatred, fear, and failed relationships—as well as in the greater world—the ecological calamities, economic misfortunes, religious bigotry, political tyranny, military aggression, and cultural collapse—are all consequences of the ways our conscious relationships with the world are distorted and subverted by the projected perceptions of our own unconscious fears and desires.

All these repeating patterns of human activity, both individual and collective, are shaped by the inevitable process of unconscious projection—“inevitable” precisely because it is unconscious, and for that reason simply not subject to conscious scrutiny and rational decision making. For example, “seeing conspiracies everywhere” is, in itself, an unconscious, symbolic projection of the nagging, preconscious knowledge of being part of a great conspiracy ourselves—a not-fully-conscious conspiracy of unexamined assumptions and patterns of thoughts and feelings that reflect and perpetuate the status quo of our individual and collective lives.

Our current collective economic, political, and religious life rests upon and reflects the masculinist, rationalist, intellectual, antiemotional, nationalist, separatist, elitist, and isolationist way we live at both the personal and collective levels. These attitudes are so deeply ingrained that they are invisible to us. They surround us in childhood and, for the most part, remain below the horizon of rational awareness in adulthood. They form the unseen and unacknowledged background of our frustrations and anxieties and are an inescapable part of contemporary global and personal life.

The primary process that feeds, reifies, and perpetuates these unconscious patterns is projection. Projection is not just a neurotic “defense mechanism,” of interest only to therapists and their clients when it assumes the forms of “transference” and “countertransference.” It is a universal, unconscious pattern of evolving human awareness itself.

The key to understanding projection is this “evolutionary” significance. It is through projection that we gather our first consciously articulate awareness of previously unconscious aspects of our own being. We see in others that which is pressing to become more conscious in ourselves. We mistake these as objective descriptions of “others” and sincerely believe that these things we “see” in them have nothing to do with our own selves. The deeper truth of the matter is that we become aware of evolving aspects of our own interior lives initially in the form of the projections we make on others. As the current entertainment jargon has it: “If you spot it, you’ve got it!”

It seems to us as though we are looking objectively at other people and situations that exist independently and are exclusively outside ourselves, when in fact we are looking at our nascent awareness of aspects of our own individual and collective identity in this unconsciously projected form. These aspects of our own character and personality are initially always much easier to perceive in others than to identify and take conscious responsibility for as aspects of our own being.

These unconscious projections come in negative and positive “flavors.” They are as visible in hero worship and love at first sight as they are in racism, sexism, and classism. Either way, these seemingly objective views of others around us are born out of our own propensities, which we have not yet consciously acknowledged as our own and for which we are not yet prepared to take conscious responsibility.

In this vitally important sense, the problems we unconsciously create for ourselves personally and globally are the result not so much of projection itself as of the refusal to examine our perceptions more carefully and withdraw the projections that could, should, or would help us become more consciously aware of our own awakening possibilities and propensities.

The universality of projection not only applies to the collective denial of human status to “our enemies”; it also applies directly to the repeating patterns of failed individual relationships and the spiritual search that characterize the lives of so many people today. It seems that a great number of us would rather believe that our personal frustrations and misfortunes are the result of other people consciously lying and conniving to betray us, than admit to even the possibility that these repeating patterns in our experience might be shaped by unconscious factors in which we ourselves play a decisive and unwitting role through projection.

As the decades roll by, it seems more and more clear: if we are to have any real hope of resolving our enmities and destructive rivalries—both personally and collectively—we must begin to take responsibility for our initial projections and turn our conscious attention, individually and collectively, to the symbolic nature and content of our own unconscious interior lives.

History can be understood as the record of the desperate, continuing race between education and disaster. We have vast and complex information about how to manipulate the physical world to satisfy our needs and desires and little information about the deep, unconscious, symbolic nature of those same unconscious needs and desires. We must begin to admit to ourselves how our own unconscious energies influence and shape our waking actions and beliefs, particularly through the “automatic,” unexamined process of projection (again, “automatic” because it is not subject to conscious consideration, judgment, or control). If we are to survive, individually and collectively, we must make the effort necessary to plumb the depths of the metaphoric “darkness” of our own hidden lives.

To put it simply and bluntly: any plans of salvation (personal or collective, economic or political, scientific or religious) that ignore these unconscious factors are doomed to failure, no matter how sincere, well-motivated, carefully thought through, or seemingly practical they may appear to be.

Therefore, if we are to find “salvation” of any kind, we must find practical and reliable ways of becoming more consciously aware of our own and others’ “hidden” unconscious lives. Unless leaders do so, they will unconsciously collude with those that follow them, not recognizing that they are leading the whole organization off the edge of a cliff. As long as both leaders and followers are trapped in the same unconscious projection, they will fail to see the world accurately, and racism, war, and environmental devastation will continue. They will inevitably get mired down in intensely involving but counterproductive turf wars in and between organizations, which only serve to feed our denial of the real issues facing us.

Shared Dream Work as a Strategy to Understand Projections

I began doing group dream work when I was a community organizer working to diffuse the powerful interracial projection and scapegoating that was making it impossible to cooperatively solve neighborhood problems.

Sharing dreams with others on some sort of regular basis is a practical means of bringing that which is previously unconscious up to the surface of awareness, so we can begin to take more conscious responsibility for our thoughts and actions. Moreover, hearing someone else’s dreams helps them become a person to the listener—not just a body with a particular look and skin color to project upon. If you share your perception of another person’s dream, you can also begin to notice that your reading of that dream may tell you more about yourself than them (i.e., we inevitably project our own issues onto other people’s dreams, just as we do on their actions in everyday life).

One of the reasons why I am such a proponent of group projective dream work as a strategy for transforming individual and group enmities and misunderstandings is that all conversations about the deeper meanings and implications of dreams are so obvious and inescapably clear as projections. Even if I am a dyed-in-the-wool Freudian behaviorist and am sincerely convinced that all my knowledge and information about unconscious dreams is scientific and has been gathered by rational, objective research and study, I still have no way of applying this supposedly objective information to any particular dream other than by forming my own imagined version of the dreamer’s original dream experience and moving forward from there.

There is no better exercise, in my experience, to bring people to a vivid (and occasionally uncomfortable) recognition of their own unconscious habits of projection than persuading them to share dreams with one another and to talk openly together about their possible meanings and interpretations. Sooner or later, the realization dawns with increasing clarity that what is true about discussing the possible meanings of dreams—namely that it is all projection—is also true of all discussions and about everything (including the big four topics of greatest tension and disagreement: sex, religion, politics, and child rearing).

The realization that it really is all projection is one of the foundational principles of exploring dreams with an eye to their deeper meaning and significance. It is also a very reliable foundation for searching for practical solutions to our shared problems, both personal and collective.

The greatest stumbling block in the exploration of our own and others’ dreams is mistaken literalism. This is a particularly poignant and pervasive problem, since dreams do, from time to time, have literal levels of meaning and implication. If, for example, I dream that I am careening down a mountain road and the brakes fail, it is always a good idea to take my waking-life vehicle to my mechanic and get the brakes checked. If there is a nascent problem with my car’s brakes that I sensed unconsciously and, therefore, dreamed about before I had any waking-life awareness that there was anything wrong with the brakes, so much the better. However, even if there is a level of literal warning about my actual brakes failing, there will also always be other simultaneous levels of meaning and significance referring symbolically to other areas of my life. It may, for example, point toward my tendency to “move too fast” and not “slow down when my (social and emotional) safety demands it.” Or, perhaps, it metaphorically refers to the way I handle myself in relationships, or how I seek advancement and recognition in the workplace.

Simultaneously, at the collective level, there may be an implication of impending collective “crashes,” particularly if the vehicle in the dream has other people in it and even more so if the vehicle in the dream is designed for collective transportation—like a bus or a train.

As we share and explore our dreams together, it is important to remember that only the original dreamer can “remember” what the dream was all about. And, of course, for the dreamer, the temptation to take the dream literally is far greater than for anyone listening to and imagining the dream. For the original dreamer, it seemed to be a literal experience. This is one of the primary reasons why sharing one’s dreams with others and listening to their projections (born out of their own imagined versions of the dream) is such an interesting and potentially productive strategy for becoming more aware of one’s own previously out-of-sight-and-out-of-mind unconscious life, deeper motivations, and creative energies.

When the effort to remember and better understand our dreams is shared with others, particularly in a context that consciously acknowledges the inevitability of unconscious projection in the process, it is an invaluable way to gain insight into the previously “hidden” factors that shape both our personal and collective experiences. As we gain more understanding of these previously unknown and unacknowledged unconscious patterns in our psyches, it becomes possible to change and transform even the most seemingly intractable repeating patterns of fear, frustration, and dissatisfaction in our lives.

It may be more difficult to see that all our social and relational interactions are also determined to the same profound and inescapable extent by unconscious projection, and yet it is the case. The experience of raising projections up into the light of consciousness in the course of exploring one another’s dreams also leads to a dawning realization of the profound extent to which projections shape all our experiences, interactions, and decision-making processes, awake and asleep.

Withdrawing Projections in Other Ways

There are, of course, ways to be made aware of our projections. For example, many organizations, like many individuals, project positive qualities onto themselves and negative ones onto other organizations or individuals. Transformational leaders can develop the capacity to notice when members of their group are demonizing or feeling victimized by others, knowing that when people get particularly worked up over something, their own complexes are likely being tapped and projection is becoming rampant. Such leaders can slow things down, begin to investigate why there is such heat over the matter, and seek out the more objective facts of the situation.

Sometimes a marketing study, an employee satisfaction survey, or other objective data can begin to call into question such a dualistic view of things, enabling an organization to see itself more realistically. Similarly, in a political election, where one party has convinced itself of the diabolical nature of the other, finding out that the voters see things differently can begin to call one’s certainty into question.

Leaders who can listen to and learn from input they do not necessarily want to hear have the capacity to assist others in doing so. Unfortunately, sometimes leaders who withdraw their projections and try to educate the rest of us to do so may be undercut by those who see vilifying opponents as a sign of strength. This sad fact shows how society can encourage projection and how a dualistic view of reality, no matter how skewed it might be, can masquerade as realism.

Leaders who understand the phenomenon of projection are sometimes able to notice what story they are telling, what archetypal narrative informs that story, and the results of living out that plot. For some, the simple act of telling six different stories about the same circumstances—especially if two or three of those stories are from the point of view of the person they regard as their enemy or opponent—can help them see where they are projecting and how they might withdraw that projection and view the situation differently.

Whether through psychotherapy, dream analysis, meditation, narrative analysis, deep listening, or simply a commitment to being fully honest with themselves, leaders can develop the capacity to recognize their projections and those of others and help individuals and groups withdraw those projections in the interest of solving common problems. These are the kind of leaders we need the most in the twenty-first century. Until such abilities become normal in groups and organizations, we will continue to fail to realize our dreams of peace, justice, and shared prosperity. However, were we all to learn to recognize and withdraw projections, those dreams would actually become possible.