Projection, Sex and Aggression

“You want to make love to me,”  said the troll to the princess.
The princess thinks, ‘well, not really….maybe I would like to make love to somebody…but not you,"
Then the troll persists and insists and insinuates and eventually the defences of the princess break down.  Indeed, the troll might well actually  ‘rape’ the princess and later say, “you wanted that.”
But the princess never really did.
If she was drinking or smoking dope though she couldn’t know for sure because drugs and alcohol cloud one’s judgement and impair one’s sense of reality.
“You asked for it.”  says the troll.
But the princess doesn’t ‘remember’ ‘asking for it.
Worse, after the fact, she feels terrible and is sure it’s all a horrible mistake.
It is a mis-take. But whose.
Trolls are great salesmen and saleswomen.
You go into a car store and the sales man says to you as you’re admiring the Lexus, “You'd really like to be in the drivers” seat".  And yes, you might consider that but not if the cost of the experience is going to result in your children not going to university.
Projection is the experience of having my feelings attributed to another persons.  It’s the experience of having another person “attribute’  their feelings or desires to me.
In 70’s communications psychology therapists attempted to have people ‘own’ their feelings and desires.  To this end, they taught and encouraged people to use “I” statements.
“I feel you want to make love to me,” said the troll to the princess.
“Those may be your feelings but they’re not mine,” replied the princess.
On the flip side, the paranoid, says, “You want to hurt me.”  or “I feel you want to hurt me."
Freud said that fundamentally our human drives reduce to ’sex or aggression’.
As a metaphor ‘fuck or fight’ are places of discussion where one can get greater clarity because of their ‘extremes’.  It’s similar to a process of discussing “straw men”, extreme arguments to understand where the ‘middle position’ is.
The princess says to the troll, “I want to be your friend but I don’t want to have sex with you or kill you."
Projection is normally ‘unconscious’ but may actually be a conscious process when used by a psychopath or sociopath.
It’s critical to understanding this because the ‘good feelings’ people have when they are drinking or smoking marijuana or using GHB is that of being among friends.  Drugs break down our fundamental immunological sense of self and ‘other’ or self and the ‘stranger’.
Women, especially, the young in general, when they are drinking or using drugs can be ‘suckered’ by the projections of others.
“You want to kiss me."
“You want to fight me don’t you?"
When I was younger I was raped by a person who consciously utilized these techniques manipulatively.  Being older and trained specifically in these ‘boundary busting’ projective strategies and utilizing drugs to “lower my inhibitions” he took advantage of me.
We know today of girls who are ‘seduced’ but rarely do we talk about boys who are subjected to the same kinds of trauma and manipulation.
Seduction is distinct from manipulation in the underlying ‘love’ and ‘empathy’ that the seducer and seducee experiences.  In contrast the ’user’ lacks the capacity to consider truly the other persons desires or feelings. With projection I ‘dominate’ your inner world with my ‘desires’ and ‘feelings’. I over ride the possibility of your distinctness and difference.  The user and taker simply considers the other an object, like a mattress, for they can’t conceive other others having feelings and depth beyond their own shallow narcissism.
I may indeed be so psychotic, so narcissistically injured, that I truly believe that Angelina Jolie is even now just waiting for my phone call.
I have treated some ‘celebrity’ stalkers and have been ’stalked on several occasions’ by psychotic people whose depth of inner inferiority is such that they project onto others that they ‘desire’ them.  Because they falsely believe that if those people did want to have sex with them, then their self image would improve. It’s quite likely that I’d feel good if Angelina Jolie or Rita Hayworth or Nicole Kidman or Taylor Swift wanted me.  I’d feel pretty powerful too if Cassius Clay or Wayne Gretzky or Mohammed Ali  wanted to fight with me.
The key here is to understand that ‘projection’ comes out of inferiority.
A beautiful young woman actually once did try to have sex with me, at least it certainly appeared that way, when she was trying to sell me a house.  The house was rather dilapidated and not what I wanted but the saleswoman seemed so desperate and seductive that she seemed willing to throw her body into the mix to get the sale.  I don’t think the saleswoman for the Taj Mahul would be trying to the ’sweeten’ the deal with me with sex.  The Taj Mahal tends to sell itself.
The trouble with projection is that it’s tied in with another aspect of psychological development, merger.  When we are infants, we are indeed ‘merged’ with our mothers.  As a fetus  in the womb  we are de facto ‘one’, a mother child unit,  linked by the umbilical cord.  As we grow we ’separate’.  The one becomes two yet there is this desire to overcome the ‘isolation’ of existence.  Each of us has ‘boundaries’ about us. Not really boundaries but membranes for sure.
I personally don’t like this term boundaries because as  biological beings we are surrounded by membranes not boundaries ‘per se’.  Boundaries comes out of the political and social schools of thought rather than the biological. Membranes have forms of active and passive transfer and are always interconnected with their environments and their neighbours.  They are  dynamic and flows and exchanges as compared to boundaries which bring to mind the fixed, rigid static and 19th century thinking.  
Psychotic projection is about one individual wanting to become ‘one’ with another to overcome their ’sense of separateness’.  Unfortunately or fortunately the merger (sex or aggression) doesn’t solve the problem for the individual.  So they quickly move on like parasites when the host has become immune to their type of drama.
It’s been said alcoholics and addicts don’t want relationships but rather ’take hostages’.
The users and manipulators don’t really care deeply what you want because they are obsessed with their own desires and feelings.  If they are sexually aroused then ‘you made them that way’ because they ‘don’t own’ their own feelings and desires. There is nothing more immature and antiquated than a man who said “I had to rape you because you were wearing a mini skirt”.  Clearly such a deeply inferior individual or rather an individual with such deep sense of inferiority lacks personal self control and sees the environment and others as controlling them.
Melanie Klein an early child psychoanalytic theorist described the ’splitting’ we see with the projective as being the inability of the child to acknowledge that the mother has a ‘good breast’ and a “bad breast’ rather than her being ’the good breast” or “the bad breast”.  To the ‘egomaniac with and inferiority complex” ( a common description of narcissists or alcoholics or addicts) others are only good when they are serving the individuals needs. That they have a life independent of being a breast is inconceivable to the baby at an earlier developmental stage, the narcissist who has not developed empathy because of early childhood trauma, or the narcissitically regressed due to later trauma or simply the alcoholic or addict.  Alcohol and drugs of addiction cause developmental and emotional regression and retardation.
The thing about ‘projective’ individuals is that they make already complicated matters such as sexual relationships more messy.  For an adult person to have sex and share bodily fluids with another they must join membranously with another.  In the old days of boundary talk and ‘every man is a castle’ we’d say we had to ‘let down the drawbridge and drain the moat to ‘let the other person in’.  The trouble with that boundary metaphor is that indeed we are more like mollusks or amoebas in sex and the experience is fundamentally that of ‘merger’.  In the physical act of orgasm we ‘lose ourselves’ and ‘become one’.  The problem then becomes ‘separation’.
With the individual with an ‘inferiority complex’ they want to remain stuck on. They can go on to be the love addict.  Alternatively the narcissist having had their ‘sexual addiction’  “fix” just wants to move on to the next ‘host’.  Half people like narcissists are like vampires and mosquitos, they are parasitic in their relationships.  They ‘attach’ and don’t let go, not gently  as ‘loyal’ people but rather with the grip of death of ‘needy’ people.  Alternativelty  they are so superficial that they just  bash about one to the next like a pig in in a fine parlour.
Historically in ‘courtship’ and ‘community’ relationships ‘grew’ and ‘climaxed’.  My gay patient said of the alcoholic gay bar “scene” “we shook dicks before we shook hands’ and there wasn’t time ‘to learn or remember names”.  The ‘alcoholic gay bar scene’ is no longer limited to the ‘gay’ population. It’s the metaphor of any ‘night club’ or ‘alcoholic mixing scene’.  Theorists in the LGBT community described the alcoholism and lack of relationship with only raw sex and exploitative encounters as being related to the shame and hidden ‘illegal’ “illicit” nature of the sexual contacts prior to legalization of homosexuality. That ‘illicit’ nature of the sexual encounter between strangers has spilt over into the general population following ‘AIDS’ which resulted in the feeling of ‘extreme risk taking’.  When two people were attracted to each other even superficially in the gay bar coupled with copious alcohol they ‘merged’.  This was thought because they were running from their own ’shamefulness’ to be with another in ‘validating’ experience. (See the classic text Velvet Rage) .  The same holds true today with all stranger sexual encounter in the ‘bar scene’ because the dangers are explicit and there’s such ‘alienation’ in the general consumer culture.
Enough on the ‘description’ of the phenomena.  What to do about it?  Of course the 70’s gave us ‘I” statements but really, the language changes but the insanity prevails. That’s the fundamental problem of political correctness.  We change the names of things so Auschwitz,  the Nazi extermination gas chamber, was called  the “Solution”.  The word ‘abortion’ is acceptable but ‘murder’ is distasteful.  Fuck is distasteful, but ‘make love’ is acceptable.  The South African Army didn’t ‘kill’ the blacks, they ‘culled them’.
Language is important but the politically correct normally are content to ‘relabel’ gas chambers because changing the sign on things is cheap and gives the ‘appearance’ of change. Indeed they commonly call this ‘real change’ when it’s usually just more of the same with a different ‘spin’.
Obviously avoiding drugs and alcohol all together is perhaps the healthiest ways adults can avoid poor judgement in relationships.  Drugs and alcohol caused the sense of ‘false’ merger’ and are commonly associated with projection and exploitation.
But projection occurs all around us.  People ‘speak’ for others. Politicians are an especially bad lot for claiming to speak for the ‘people’ when they are as often promoting their agenda.
“Do you want to make love with me” said the prince to the princess.
“Do you want a fight?” said the princess to the prince.
At the extremes of sex and aggression we can see ‘our part in’ the relationships but this is true at all levels between.  
“You want pizza tonight?"
“No, why would you think that?"
“You always want pizza on friday night."
“But that was then, this is now, I think I want Chinese tonight."
Don’t ‘ASSUME”  Assume makes an ASS out of U and Me.
More importantly don’t get ‘angry’ or ‘lustful’ or emotionally charged at the knee jerk level in relationships in general.  Go slow.
“You want pizza tonight?"
“No, why would you think that?"
“What about Chinese?"
Now all of this said, there are indeed a whole group of people who are sexually and physically different than the mainstream.  They believe that by having sex first they avoid all the nuisance of relationship. They like to start by fighting with another person physically and getting to know them that way. I remember as an adolescent making best friends with a guy I fought with.  We’d bashed each other with our fists and feet till we came to a draw and later just began to hang out as friends. We had music in common and felt that after that fight we were somehow bonded.  A lot of military folk are that way. Ex prostitutes have told me that they liked to get the ‘sex out of the way’ so they could find out if they liked a person.
I mention this because the whole issue of merger and projection then becomes part of the ‘risk taking’ ‘fast living’ ‘carpe diem’ life style of these individuals.  As a psychiatrist I don’t approve or disapprove. I have problems when people get hurt and people who are using drugs and alcohol are likely to get hurt.  Also we see young people getting taken advantage of by older more sophisticated people. When I worked in the theatre and television the old lecherous men and women were for ever literally taking advantage of the young and naive with false promises and gross manipulation.
In retrospect I think of “Hannibal the Cannibal” saying ‘You really want me to eat your brain."
And Monty Python answering, “Not really, I was just looking for my lost parrot”.
I have written about this “projection”, ‘classic defence’, so that people can be more aware of when they are doing it but most importantly when others are doing it.  You can’t counter projection by saying “You’re projecting” because it’s either something the other person is doing unconsciously and will deny or the other person is a manipulator and will deny as well. However if you are aware of this you can recognize it.
You can say, “is this really what I want.'
You can then say to yourself, “I drove my rolls royce to the 7-11. I want some peanuts.  I didn’t want to have sex right there with the rather plain girl buying nachos beside me..  I didn’t want to share my life with her and half my assets. I think that might have been her desire."
The troll said to the princess, “You want to have sex with me."
The princess responded, “Maybe not. Give me some time to get back to you.  Let me think about that.  I’ll call you. No you give me your phone number.”

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy

B.F. Skinner developed the 'behavioural therapy', essentially programming animals with reward mechanisms.  It wasn't original but he systematized it and popularized it and made this ancient 'training' and 'educating' mechanism scientific so that it could be 'programmed'.  Rats and maizes and all that sort of stuff was shown to be made up of little building blocks.  Many clinical applications followed.
Pavlov's dogs, 'conditioned' by being giving meat on the sound of a bell, salivated thereafter when they heard the bell.  
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy followed showing that 'cognitions' programed behaviour.  No surprise. If I think I'm going to fail at a task and say to myself, "you're a failure, you're a failure", I'm more likely to fail.  Like the 'little engine who can'  subjects in experiments were told to change their 'self talk' and surprise surprise the outcome was scientifically significantly altered.
Insight therapy for example, psychoanalysis, delved into the past to see what was causing present day limitations, whereas Cognitive Behavioural Therapy focussed principally on the present.
It is in fact an "educational" form of therapy and lends itself to group instruction, reproduction and work book materials.
Feeling Good was the 1980 classic in the new "Mood Therapy" written by Burns who was a student of the greatest Cognitive Behaviour Therapist of the day, Dr. Beck. His "Beck Depression Scale" remains today as a standard Cognitive Behavioural Therapy tool.
Patients, or clients, like students, are encouraged to record their 'thinking', what are they 'actively thinking about a problem .
eg.  "No one likes me."
Then the person is encouraged to write the 'cognitive error'  ie this is a Generalization.  Whenever a person thinks "no one likes me" they are indeed encouraged to respond to their inner Cognitive errors 'that is a 'Generalization", some people don't like me, some people do."
Psychology , a relative new kid on the block, tends to forever 'rename' things and claim them.  It's a very 'plagiaristic pseudoscience' at this level.
The original "cognitive errors' or 'cognitive disonance'  or 'negative programming' was best described years ago in philosophy under the heading, "Fallacies".
Most of the cognitive errors which are popularly called with 'neat memorable psychology labels' were rigorously defined and given the proper labels of 'illogical' thinking.  Indeed Cognitive Behavoural Therapy in it's own way attempts to encourage 'logical thinking'.
Much of the understanding and communications used in teaching Cognitive Behavioural Therapy were originally developped in Theology and Philosophy and now are renamed and over taken by psychology.

Michael LaBoisiere, (42 Fallacies)  a French philosopher has, to my mind, made the Fallacies most understandable.  Listening to patients for decades I've noted the 'illogical' thinking and the 'emotionally reasoning' and simply ticked off the 'fallacies' the patients use much as Laboissiere describes.  Burns has in his classic popularizing book Feeling Good listed a few of these cognitive errors like 'catastrophising' , "the world is going to end".
The fallacie of catastrophising is taking a single event and assuming that one event represents the whole and because it's a negative event assuming that the future will be negative.
Affirmations are 'thought blocking' techniques that go back thousands of years in pastoral care and theological literature.
Patients are advised to say "All shall be well" rather than "I"m going to die, I'm going to die."  Since the panic thought leads the body to accelerated heart rate hyperventialiation and blacking out it's fairly maladaptive.  So by 'blocking' the negative thought with the affirmation 'all shall be well' one breaks up the negative behavioural program by changing cognition. 

The term 'emotional reasoning' can be understood by considering the statement 'It feels good so it is good."  Translate this to "it looks good so it is good" and you have a person who would pick up a 'red' coloured insect without realizing that 'red' is often the symbol for deadly.


Ad hominen means 'against the man'.  The cognitive distortion would be to say, "I can't believe what John told me about physics because John isn't married".  Commonly people have this kind of bizarre thinking.

Generalizations are fallacious and cognitive distortions can occur.  Eg.  My mother told me I could  trust her brother but he sexually abused me, therefore everything my mother says is false."  This isn't true and therefore based on this one 'event' patient generalizes that what their mother told them about the existence of gravity is also false.  Not true.

Alot of the problems with distorted thinking can be found in the media presentation of stories, marketting and advertising.  Clinton was not a poor president because he had sex with Monica.  However, since he had a contractual relationship with his wife called marriage and a duty to his children as father and as a president he had a responsibility to follow contracts and a duty to the country. When questioned by Star as to whether or not he had sexual relations with Monica he could reasonably have answered "I didn't commit adultery".  Biblically, technically, oral sex is not mentioned and adultery laws most clearly are related to knowing who the father is in patriarchal societies.  However when he answered he 'did not have sexual relationships with Monica", he either 'lied under oath' thereby forfeiting his responsibility to the american people or he didn't know that what he was doing was deemed 'sexual' whereby he'd be a complete idiot and not worthy or safe to be President.  The media coverage of this pivotal moment in history was however mostly at the level of a lot of rather stupid media coverage, crass and sexual.  We can't have good media with so many perverted mental midgets being allowed to speak on tv. However the vast majority who watch mainstream media aren't themselves that swift. Most media is marketed to the majority who are under the college level.  Hence the stupidity of mainstream media and the continuation of the insaniety for which CBT is needed to address.

Eg.  I loved him so I killed myself.

Love does not beget suicide, only narcissism begets this kind of adolescent suicidal behaviour.  Yet Hollywood continues to celebrate it's suicides and continues to support the cognitive disorder that love is destructive when theoretically at least love is considered love because it's life enhancing.

Schizophrenia per se is often associated with flipping the pronowns which we call 'projection'.  In cognitive behaviour therapy we encourage people to use "I " statement.  "I don't like you" rather than "You don't like me".

Psychiatric Defence Mechanisms

The term "defence" was coined by the early psychoanalysts. Freud perceived the ego as negotiating between the demands of the id, (sometimes referred to as the wild one, or child) and the superego (sometimes referred to as society or the "parent"). Eric Berne, the psychoanalytic founder of Transactional Analysis described Freud's Superego, Ego, and Id as Parent, Adult and Child looking at the transactions ocurring between these modes of thinking and relating in the more conscious and interpersonal world whereas Freud's work had been predominantly uncovering what occurred unconsciously. The early analysts decribed the ego 'defending' against the demands and later therapists would describe these as 'coping' mechanisms.

In Sadock's Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry 7th ed, there's a excellent Classification of Defence Mechanisms in Table 6.1-2. In this table the defences are grouped in 4 major categories, Narcissistic, Immature, Neurotic and Mature.
Narcissistic defences are listed as , Denial, Distortion and Projection.
Immature defences are Acting out, Blocking, Hypochondriasis, Introjection, Passive Aggressive behaviour, Regression. Schizoid Fantasy, and Somatization.
Neurotic Defences are seen as Controlling, Displacement, Externalization, Inhibition, Intellectualization, Isolation, Rationalization, Dissociation, Reaction formation, Repression and Sexualization.
Mature Defences are Altruism, Anticipation, Asceticism, Humor, Sublimation, and Suppression.
http://drsanity.blogspot.com/2004/08/psychiatry-101-defense-mechanisms.html

Knowing the origins of these words and how the understanding of each developed over a hundred years of psychoanalytic studies is most illuminating.
Today while some of these words continue to hold true to their original meaning others have been quite distorted in pop psychology. They are also used too often in a denigrating way and not ironically the so called "mature defences" of humor, asceticism and altruism once wonderfully agreed on by society and it's leading therapists are now not infrequently maligned.

The world of advertising and popularity consensus political machinations indeed appeals to the majority who not uncommonly live little in the rarified world of "mature defences".

"Don't worry, be happy," is a marvellous theme song for Denial though in a different light it becomes the Suppression of maturity.
Distortion is what politics and the media live on.
Projection is the defence where I say you are doing what I'm thinking and feeling and thereby deny my own part in the subsequent interaction. The paranoid bully forever asks "what are you looking at!"
Beaurocrats live on 'passive aggression'. Confrontation is a 'dirty' word in a world where 'deniability' is the end all and be all of success and survival.
Schizoid fantasy is the promise of drugs and alcohol. Why experience "reality on reality's terms when a little something will allow you to alter reality. Increasingly the game world allows you to be the hero of your existence as well.
"Acting out" is the television favourite. Every TV hero from " Bueler" to "Godfather" celebrates the adolescent solution to all problems. "Don't think, do it!
"Controlling" is what the accountants and tax department tell you is the solution to life's anxieties while all of them and their leadership have spent the tax payers money and lives with impunity, denial, distortion and supreme acting out.
"Rationalization" is what makes the legal profession go round while intellectualization is the basis of academia. But the humor about these is the major stuff of comedians when the 'disconnects' are so readily apparent on an almost daily basis.
"Reaction formation", turning an unnacceptable impulse into it's opposite, is the bread and butter of censors and the judgemental. The televangelists condemn human behaviour while being caught themselves in animalistic orgies.
"Sexualization" is the essence of marketting. All life's anxieties are reduced with underarm deodorants and musk scented Depends.
But where is Altruism, anticipation, asceticism, sublimation in our society. "I want it all and I want it now" goes against any of these ideas. Yet the original analysts collectively understood that these were the most enduring and mature coping strategies which came into play as individuals gained wisdom and maturity.
We all use all of the defences mechanisms some of the time. It's only human. What we rely on reflects what historically was seen as emotional maturity. The defences or coping strategies have stood the test of time and are still recognised for their contribution to understanding why so often even our best intentions go awry.