Marie-Louise von Franz: On Projection
[[Sometimes von Franz is easier to understand than Jung, and fairy tales are both enjoyable to read and windows onto psychological and cultural processes.]]
“Sacred” convictions are in this sense always suspect, unless they exist together with tolerance and a due regard for purely human considerations .
On the Difficulty of Insight into One’s Shadow
The reason it is so difficult to acquire insight into one’s own shadow is that inferior personality traits are mostly of an emotional nature.
Emotions and affects are to a large extent relatively autonomous; they possess consciousness and can only with great difficulty be controlled.
Projections coupled with emotions isolate the human being from his surroundings and put him into an auto-erotic or autistic state.
If it is not only his own shadow that stands behind the projections but also the contra-sexual components of the personality, or perhaps still deeper archetypal contents, then insight into the projections in which these are involved is accompanied by almost insuperable difficulties.
The father and mother divinities of all religions, for instance, are now often found to be lurking behind a not particularly unusual projection of a father or mother-imago, and these give to the parental images a wholly inappropriate power over the individual.
Or else it is a matter not of collective religious images or ideas but rather of modern variations of these, such as materialism, communism, socialism, fascism, liberalism, intellectualism, and so on—ideas by which people are completely “‘possessed”’ and for which they can fight with murderous emotions.
“Sacred” convictions are in this sense always suspect, unless they exist together with tolerance and a due regard for purely human considerations .
Projection and Recollection in Jungian Psychology
Page 19
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