What follows is the first chapter for the interactive book, Politics on the Couch (the introduction can be read here). Readers' comments are welcome and an integral part of this experiment.
PROJECTION
Pogo got it right in 1970 when he said, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
Projection is an unconscious effort to look for an outside cause rather than an internal one - it often results in blaming or fearing others in order to protect the self from recognizing unwanted impulses, usually of destructive nature. Using this mechanism helps us manage anxiety by mobilizing our aggression against internal threats we now perceive as external.
It is not simply impulses that are projected, however. One can protect against fears of destruction at the hands of a parent -say a hypercritical mother or physically abusive father - by externalizing that scary relationship and superimposing it onto someone current. Hence a boss may be experienced as extra-punitive because the employee had a punitive father.
While the result of such projection is paranoid thinking, it primes us to fight and thereby feel less helpless. Our enemy no longer lurks inside. How we see the world and respond to it is partly determined by what we project onto it. We may project internal conflicts as well, partly to get rid of them, and partly to better resolve them.
So how is thinking about projection useful in helping us understand political candidates, the media, ourselves? Since this process is unconscious: the person doing the projecting is unaware of doing it. But voters needn't be clueless. For instance, we can look at the names candidates call each other and wonder whether they are really talking about themselves.
When Senator Clinton called Senator Obama naïve, couldn't she have been describing herself in several ways? She was naïve when she believed President Bush's lies - obvious to many of her Senate colleagues - when she gave him the authority to wage war in Iraq. She also behaved naively when she assumed her Democratic nomination was inevitable, saying at the end of 2007 that her nomination would be secure by February 5 - super Tuesday. Even if she gets that nomination, which she still might as of this writing, it will have been by no means inevitable.
Kids understand projection: When someone calls them a nasty name they say, "I know you are but what am I?" Candidates do the same at times, though so far Obama seems to be the most successful at it. On Memorial Day 2008, McCain said of Obama, "He really has no experience or knowledge or judgment about the issue of Iraq." Obama's quick rejoinder, that McCain was the person who hasn't been able to learn from the experience of a failed war policy, is similar to an interpretation a good psychoanalyst might make that the patient is "projecting" when he accuses the analyst of doing the very thing he himself is doing. Obama also understands the effect that displaced images have on voters as continues to say at every stump speech, "John McCain is running for George Bush's third term."
The examples used so far focus on disowning unwanted aspects of self by ascribing them to someone else. But one can project positive feelings to protect against anxiety about separation from good parents or yearned-for protectors. Projection can sometimes get internal conflicts outside the self so one can resolve them in a wider context. While I have no proof, I think that Obama's biracial history could be an impetus for his unusual emphasis on resolving political differences between people.
His message of change resonates powerfully because its source seems to stem from his own relentless need to resolve inner conflict. I think young voters in particular respond to his efforts, as entering the political is one avenue for adolescents to work on their own struggles of self definition and separation from home. Obama's struggle about what to do with Reverend Wright reflects his own inner conflict - one he has often resolved through accepting that people are not one-dimensional.
Where voters - all of us - run into trouble is when we cannot distinguish how much our own projections influence what we call "political realities." The fact that there are so many different voter reactions to the Hillary-Barack conflict makes clear the sway our own projections have over our emotional perceptions. What projections might fire the passionate devotion shown by Clinton and Obama supporters? And what projections account for their antipathy to the other candidate?
To me, idiosyncratic family relations - unconscious or not - must influence our different perceptions. Is our passion evoked by a sense that Hillary and Barack are behaving like children fighting over the estate of their recently deceased father (read Bush's totally failed policies)? Now that father is gone and no longer scary, they want everything for themselves.
To those of us who are children of divorce, the experience could be similar. We may be so identified with one parent that to vote for the other - should the candidate representing the projected other parent get nominated - would be a disloyal and therefore unthinkable act. To some, Hillary is the carping mother who wants to destroy the father, no matter its effect on their children. To others, Obama is the charismatic father coming home after doing nothing all day and then demanding that he be listened to despite his wife having washed the floors, fed the children, and paid the bills.
I must also mention hope and change once more, as children often develop grandiose fantasies about themselves to compensate for frustrations they feel because their parents are powerful. Super-heroes help the child feel powerful, and many adults use sports heroes and movie stars in much the same way. Bush intimidated the media and his own staff, exposed once again by McClellan's book. Voters who felt powerless for years - not just against Bush but against the Supreme Court and Diebold - feel hope again not only of being heard but of effecting change.
But when voters spoke up clearly in 2006, even Democratic leaders turned their backs - when Nancy Pelosi took impeachment "off the table" she left Bush as powerful as ever. It was as if the election never happened. Now Obama receives deeply held fantasies of power harbored by frustrated voters. We project our own grandiose fantasies onto him - fantasies that compensate for feeling helpless against rising gas prices, for example - allowing him to seem even more heroic. This process allows his more devoted followers to identify with what are in fact their own projected wishes.
Group phenomena will be discussed in a later section. But in the meantime, what projections have you noticed in the candidates, the media, and in yourselves?
