Delusional Projection

Delusions about reality, usually of a persecutory nature. Consider this when you hear a person say such things as, “Women seem to hate me,” or “My whole family is out to get me.”Be on guard when you hear a person cite a whole group of others as all having the same opinion about the person: “all my friends,” “my whole family,” or an entire gender - “Women all...” or “Men all...” Overgeneralizing about groups of others might reveal this tendency, and it can be seen in some of the more primitive characters in many Woody Allen films.

Delusional Projection is an extremely primitive defense in that the feared state of high anxiety caused by the drives and negative beliefs about the self which are largely unconscious, have a direct expression out into the outer social environment. In our diagrammatic representation, it is as if there is a “wormhole” between the open hole in the Ego Boundary and the hole in the Personal Boundary. But it goes beyond projecting something negative on one other person (who doesn’t view themselves the way the projection would have them feel.) Rather it is a projection onto a whole group of people, and more: onto the reality of the whole environment of the social world. It is more than just saying a particular individual is angry or arrogant, or some other thing that they are not. It is like making a blanket statement about the world that the individual really believes (which is why we use the word, “delusional,” or “psychotic.”

Statements you may have occasionally heard, like, “It’s a cold, cruel world” (when it’s actually a random world of good and bad which you may encounter in varying proportions.) Or, “The government is out to get each and every one of us through taxes” (when it actually has to charge us to operate, and while secretive of necessity in many ways, most of the time it is not trying to target specific individuals for the most part, let alone every one of them.) When you hear “conspiracy theories” about agencies or corporate or governmental agencies like this, or blanket statements about whole groups of people, or about “the world” itself - ones that are overly generalized or monolithic, you may be seeing this defense mechanism.