One of the biggest drives within us is for wholeness. It is a process which goes on all through our life but which maybe accelerates as we get older. We often feel divided and conflicted. We wish to integrate all the contrasting parts inside ourselves and develop a greater harmony within, a sense of direction that is solid and does not change from week to week. The first step in achieving this is to listen deeply to our own interior intelligence and find out what it is seeking.One place we can see what it requires is where it projects onto others or onto something outside what it needs to notice for its own growth. For a while our interior need is attached to another person or to our work or some ambitions. In other words, we demand that the other person or the outside event fill in the missing parts of ourselves, rather than looking to grow within ourselves. We project the unconscious stage of our development onto another, and then act as if that person is what we imagine him or her to be. The person is actually a mirror of our needs, which we have not yet come to recognize in ourselves. As I have written before, our relationship with others reflects the current confusion or maturity of our relationship with ourselves.
It can be a great liberation to let go of projections and realize that they actually represent our interior unlived capacities. We turn within for what we sought outside. We can grow, because a part of us which was hidden is now coming to light. Sooner or later in life, we come face to face with the question of who we really are. If we do not run away but face this question in ourselves, it can be the beginning of the greatest adventure in our lives. We can find the missing pieces inside ourselves, and in this way let go and move on to becoming whole.
Just as we tend to assume that the world is as we see it, we naively suppose that people are as we imagine them to be. Although the possibility of gross deception is infinitely greater here than in our perception of the physical world, we still go on naively projecting our own psychology into our fellow human beings. In this way everyone creates for himself a series of more or less imaginary relationships based essentially on projection.
C. G Jung
