One of the most continuously fascinating ideas in psychotherapy is the concept of projection.
What this means, simply put, is that all of us have a storehouse of assumptions about what other people are like and how they will behave, which owes very little to actual people who we meet today and has a lot more to do with complications in our childhoods, which we have generally forgotten all about.
Furthermore, these projections tend to be distinctly and unfruitfully negative.
We think worse of people than we should.
We are quicker to be afraid, to be angry, and to be uncooperative than we need to be because our imaginations are filled with dark experiences which reflect our painful origins and yet fail to do justice to a broader, more innocent, and more hopeful present.
As a result, our projections gum up our relationships with the world around us.
We arrive in the presence of other people with a great deal more aggression, suspicion, fear, or doubt than is warranted in the here and now.
The theory of projections sounds simple and plausible enough.
The difficulty is that it's extremely hard to work out what it is that we are actually projecting.
We are far too much inside ourselves to see our own biases.
