Extreme Projection

The outright ignoring of a moral or psychological problem in the self, which is perceived as a deficiency in another individual or group. A prime example of this exists in the history of Nazi Germany, where a whole people, the Jews, were blamed en masse, for the economic failings of the whole German people. In the context of our everyday relationships, you might simply call this, “finger-pointing.” Any “divorce movie” that you see, from War of the Roses to Gone Girl, contains this. If you see this tendency in your social connections, you are likely looking at a relationship failure.

Notice that there is a terrible trait inside the person who uses this defense - a pathological narcissism of the most monstrous kind. And yet the very nature of the defense mechanism, which as we have said, is an unconscious social habit, is that there is a protected channel from the monstrous trait or instinct to the outside world, where it is projected onto whole groups of people. Take note that we have used the word, “monstrous,” which contains in its nature, being the “undead,” to not be fully alive, or to be both a form of death and a violent source of it.

We can infer something from this: that what is monstrous about our unconscious, our “id,” or our reptilian brain is the absence of the instinct, which we have defined as the same as shame. It is the Medusa in us, or the Narcissus in us, the absence of life, the absence of passion that is the literal “black mark on our souls.”

Extreme projection allows us to divorce ourselves entirely from its existence, to hide from our own shame, to not even be aware that it is there so that our conscious selves can even function. The shame is the Medusa, the Narcissus, and the monster inside us.