Encountering Bigotry

Befriending Projecting People in Everyday Life

Philip Lichtenberg, Janneke Beusekom, Dorothy Gibbons

• Publisher: Gestalt Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317707059
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Encountering Bigotry examines the occurrence of emotionally fraught and socially provocative expressions, such as racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, classism, and other forms of hatred of outgroups or others, in everyday experience. The editors categorize such remarks as projections, particular forms of perceiving oneself and others in the world. This projection allows the person to perceive emotional intensity without owning (i.e., without attributing to the self) the feeling or experiencing anxiety-producing emotions.Such projections are not pathological, they observe, butrather "faulty" and not beyond repair.Utilizing experiences gathered from various people and settings, and deriving theory from common psychoanalytic and Gestalt therapy, the observations and conclusions found in Encountering Bigotry are as applicable in any social context as they are in the therapeutic relationship.

PART I

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ON MUNDANE PROJECTIONS

1

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A Common Occurrence

It happens all the time. Family and friends are gathered together for a celebratory feast, Thanksgiving, Easter, or a summer's picnic in the park. Conversation is bubbly and warm, or correct and measured, or relaxed and congenial, whatever way is usual for the set of family and friends who have come together. Then, usually quite unexpectedly, someone tells a racist or ethnic joke, or comments in a sexist way. The comment isn't limited to majority groups of society and could come from anyone: father, grandmother, uncle, brother-in-law, cousin, family friend, someone known for such an orientation by some or all of those present. And the comment makes a pronounced impact on the group. Maybe all laugh and appear to join in the fun, but there is usually an accompanying undercurrent of tension that no one wants to address. Maybe there is a favorite target in the circle—the daughter, perhaps, who is known for her feminist ways, the friend who has interracial ties, the too-liberal uncle who is outspoken in his concern for the impoverished, or the family member most reactive to the latest insulting experience he or she has had to endure for being gay or dark-skinned. Whatever the particular conjunction of persons, this scene is enacted in many different gatherings and rarely, if at all, is there a simple, happy resolution of the tensions raised in these gatherings. A certain unease prevails. But for the sake of peace or harmony or family unity no one responds directly to the rift that has been created in the group. Instead, people laugh politely or with exaggerated hilarity, or avert their eyes and change the subject, or withdraw emotionally from the scene. The attempted unity of feeling, if it is achieved, costs dearly, and much of the time withdrawal and divisiveness are the unhappy outcome. Individuals—including the one who has made the comment—leave these gatherings feeling tense or angry or upset, often unaware of what has occurred and puzzled by why they so frequently leave these family gatherings feeling disconcerted and disappointed.

These sexist or racist jokes and comments have such an adverse effect on a group because they are more than just inappropriate, impolite expressions. They are powerful projections that result from the projecting person's inability or unwillingness to handle strong feelings. These projections, which may temporarily relieve the person of intense, possibly painful, feelings, stir up unresolved conflicts in those people present so that the listeners become more than just uninvolved bystanders. The listeners, too, suddenly experience burdensome feelings and find themselves thrust into an emotionally charged situation in which they may have strong convictions about both the social views expressed in the projection and the person who has just projected. But because these projections have been injected into an apparently harmonious gathering, the pressure to collaborate is subtle—it appears not as a command but as an invitation. We use the terms invitation and invitee to emphasize the point that the listener cannot remain a complete observer to what is taking place. An invitation is a call to participate in something, whether it is an invitation to a wedding or an invitation to laugh at a joke. The listener is forced to respond in some way. Even a non-response is experienced by the person who has issued the invitation as a kind of statement. Accordingly, once an invitation is launched, a listener becomes an invitee, a willing or unwilling participant in a relationship.

As we discussed the various ways that people have responded to invitations to collaborate with projections, we became aware that among those people who refused to collaborate—regardless of how they chose to refuse—there was a strong sense of responsibility to address discriminatory remarks as well as strong desires to avoid turning against those family members and friends who made the remarks and to avoid causing turmoil in a social gathering. This book is an attempt to join with those who are grappling with ways to respond in sensible and responsible fashion, with those who choose to use these invitations as ways of encountering their own strong reactions to projections. Once a person has been invited to collaborate, he or she can no longer claim innocence or non-involvement. One can choose how to act in response to the invitation, but one's actions have an impact on oneself, on the projecting person, on the immediate surroundings, and on the larger social world.

We believe that the innumerable inhumane acts the world has witnessed—wars, genocide, centuries of oppression, and racially or religiously motivated crimes—are importantly a direct result of projections. And we further suspect that such horrifying acts have their roots in the unhealthy social relations that we create or allow to exist in those groups with which we interact on a daily basis: in our families, among our friends and acquaintances, and in our workplaces. The racist or ethnic jokes or the sexist comments casually shared “among friends” in these settings are more than just harmless expressions. They are important small-scale projections and they provide the soil from which emerge the more devastating projections entailed in large-scale animosities and oppression.

It is not exceedingly difficult to observe and diagnose projections, and such practices have become commonplace both in clinical settings and in everyday interactions. We have learned, however, by our experience and by a search of the professional literature that it is much easier to recognize and to label such processes than it is to do something productive when relating to a person who is actively projecting. Labeling allows us to remain objective and somewhat detached from the person projecting; this detachment protects us from becoming actively engaged with this person who is in the midst of an intense emotional experience and it safeguards us from becoming overwhelmed by those intense feelings that have been aroused within ourselves or the projecting person as a result of the projections. Relating to someone who is actively projecting is both difficult and taxing. People do not project onto others unless they feel bothered in some way by what they may come to experience and they may go to great lengths in social relations to avoid that inner awareness. Care must be taken when engaging in this enterprise lest the projecting person become overwhelmed by unmanageable feelings.

At the same time, not dealing with projections when they are in operation is costly to the participants and ultimately involves even more difficult problems. Misunderstandings, false conceptions, alienation, antagonism, and excessive self-control are all symptoms of unattended projecting processes. Faulty projections tend to cut off communication or to attenuate it and to lead to hostilities between individuals and also between groups.

The matter is further complicated by the fact that not all projections are faulty. In order that we might understand others, we must engage in empathy, a form of projection, and accordingly projection has a healthy basis and is necessary for human development as well as basic social relations. Matching similarities between self and other, in which nothing of self is lost, is healthy and fruitful projection, and we do not focus on those sorts of processes in this analysis. We are here concerned only with those projections that are faulty, those in which the individual loses part of the self by attributing something to a person or group outside of the self.

Furthermore, we are especially interested in those instances in which a person projects and invites another to collaborate. The projecting person who makes a sexist joke may expect members of his or her audience to join in the humor or to make a typical or expected objection to it so that a kind of teasing and taunting unfolds. The collaboration need not be congenial; it just needs to conform to an expected pattern. For example, if a man always gets a heated argument from his wife in response to his sexist remarks, then they have inadvertently created a way to collaborate around his projections. Repeated, familiar responses, whether they appear supportive or confrontational, may be somewhat comforting to the projecting person, even if not to his partner, but they will not enable the person to fully realize his or her purpose.

This book consists of two parts. In Part I we explore the following complex questions about the projection process:

What lies behind a person's compulsion to project?

How is the person who is projecting attempting to change his or her psychic reality through these projections?

How do such projections affect those who witness the projections and those who are invited to collaborate in these projections?

How do those who are present during the projection contribute—perhaps unwittingly—to the conditions that give rise to such projections?

How does the person who is projecting rely on the collaboration of others to complete the projection?

How do those who are invited to collaborate with projections in everyday situations facilitate or foster those projections— and the larger social consequences of such projections— by their unwillingness or inability to manage these invitations in an effective way?

In Part II we turn from analysis of what projections are about and what they bring up in those around the projecting person to a more proactive concern: What is one to do in such situations? We explore the differences between good handling and poor handling of invitations to collaborate with projections. We see good handling as responses that lead to the reowning of projections and to increased friendliness, while we see poor handling as responses that lead to more deeply entrenched projections and isolation. We are aware that there is no one correct response to projections and that people are often only partly effective when attempting to handle an invitation to collaborate. In this book we identify five common responses that constitute poor handling and discuss in detail how these responses are hurtful to both the projecting person and the invitee. We discuss how self-hatred is a basic issue underlying these projections. We propose that for good handling to ensue, the invitee must respond to the projecting person empathically while managing a complex inner experience. Needless to say, this last statement requires a good deal of elaboration, and a significant portion of Part II is devoted to fleshing out what we mean by good handling. Throughout this essay examples are used extensively to explain and support our theoretical work. We conclude with a chapter elaborating on some issues raised by this work and reflecting on their implications for human and social endeavors.

2

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Principles of Faulty Projections

To be able to engage productively with a person who is actively projecting and who is inviting one to be a collaborator with that projection, a person must have some grasp of the basic principles of faulty projection. We believe that four such principles are especially helpful to our understanding of the process of projection and thus to our understanding of the projecting person. First, projection is partly a social phenomenon, for example, when it takes place in real or imagined social circumstances. The social situation that promotes projection is one in which the person who is projecting is experiencing too much arousal, given the support that is available for the handling ofthat aroused condition. We call this the arousal/support balance. Second, a projection enables a person to avoid awareness of possessing certain characteristics. By placing internal qualities outside of one's self, the projecting person avoids awareness of owning those thoughts, feelings, or desires that have been aroused and that would be experienced as burdensome if they were given full play in that person's awareness. The person is in fact aware of these thoughts, feelings, and desires, but he or she experiences them as belonging outside himself or herself. Thus, projection involves a special sort of awareness. Third, a projection helps the person to establish a sense of distance between the self and the disowned parts. The person is defining himself or herself by contrast with an other who carries the disowned elements of self. Fourth, a projection creates a fusion between the projecting person and the other, even though the person's purpose in projecting is to deny any connection between the self and the object of the projection. An understanding of each of these four principles of faulty projection is important in helping someone remain engaged with the person who is projecting while avoiding compliance with that projection.

Social relationships are the ground from which projections arise. These relationships are central to the arousal of thoughts, feelings, and desires in the parties to the relationship. Sometimes the social situation is responsible for instigating the arousal, as when an attractive person is seductive, a boss is demanding, a group engages in a ritual that is emotionally rich, or an invader attacks one's domain. At other times the social circumstance is merely the occasion for the expression of an aroused state, as when an already angry motorist is inconvenienced by traffic, an excited child comes home from school to relate her day's activities to her parents, or an athlete is imagining the contest that will test his or her abilities. Thus, one aspect of social conditions that facilitate projections is that they somehow are challenges to an individual, challenges that provoke thoughts, feelings, or desires that may become difficult to manage in the person's aware experience, challenges that produce heightened arousal.

However, social relationships also serve as supports to individuals in the handling of their experience. High arousal becomes troublesome only when the individual is left to his or her own devices to manage what comes up. The arousal can be any kind of excitement—love, anger, fascination, fraternal feeling. If others are present who can stay in close contact with the person experiencing challenging thoughts, feelings, or desires and who can enable the mastery of these, then projection becomes unnecessary. What is important is the support—self-support and social support—that is present to enable the experiencing of the arousal. Put together, then, imbalance in the proportion of social arousal to social support is ground for projection when the support is not adequate to the demands of arousal.

The avoidance of awareness of possessing certain thoughts, feelings, or desires, our second principle of faulty projection, comes into play when the needed support for the given arousal is not available. Laplanche and Pontalis (1973) further explain this second principle of projection: “The subject attributes tendencies, desires, etc., to others that he refuses to recognize in himself; the racist, for instance, projects his own faults and unacknowledged inclinations on to the group he reviles” (p. 351). Similarly, they state that projection “always appears as a defense, as the attribution to another (person or thing) of qualities, feelings or wishes that the subject repudiates or refuses to recognize in himself” (p. 352). In short, the person does not bear the burden of experiencing as part of himself or herself that which is seen as part of the external world. Many factors may contribute to this tendency: the feelings or thoughts are too bothersome to be owned, the person is accustomed to others carrying the emotional part of a relationship, or the individual may be psychologically lazy or incapable of tolerating certain subjective experiences. Regardless of the reasons a person has a tendency to project, the projection enables that person to split off and deny undesirable aspects of the self.

A projection not only rids the person of undesirable qualities; it also protects the projecting person from the reassimilation ofthose parts by creating a sense of distance between the person and the object of the projection. This is the third principle of projection. The projecting person places the unwanted feeling inside the other and negates that feeling by sharply differentiating self from the other: “He has that emotion; I do not.” The projecting person then marshals defenses against an awareness that such a feeling may be his or her own by constantly focusing on and criticizing this alien quality within the other. By making external that which is internal, projections permit a person to deal with undesirable thoughts or desires at a greater distance—on a social rather than on an intrapersonal level. This distance creates an illusion of safety within the projecting person. However, to maintain this safe space, the projecting person must constantly guard against an invasion from the outside world of these split-off qualities, since the absence of these qualities is an important part of his or her self-definition.

Ironically, at the same time that the projecting person is distancing the other, or putting self over against the other, he or she is also becoming tied to or fused with that other. The feeling, thought, or desire has not disappeared and freed the person to act unencumbered; it has been split off and located in the object of the projection. As a consequence, the projecting person has become dependent on the other for the bearing of his or her experience. Without this other, the projecting person would have to experience the feeling, thought, or desire as his or her own, and one central function of projection is to avoid this eventuality. Thus, the projecting individual is intimately linked to the object of his or her projection. This dependency by way of fusion is the fourth principle of faulty projection.

It is important to note that the differentiating and merging that we have described in the third and fourth principles of projection are different from what appears in wholesome human encounters. In wholesome encounters, individuals become aware of and assert their feelings, thoughts, or desires openly and directly. Individuals do not split off the undesirable; rather, they stay with their experience and with the support of others they hold it, mold it, and integrate it into the self. This allows the engagement and appreciation of both similarities and differences among the parties involved. Consequently, they are not dependent on the other to be whole, and merging takes on a different texture. As a result of the negotiation of both the similarities and differences, the individuals together build a unified figure; they tend to merge into a “we” in which individual...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• PART I: ON MUNDANE PROJECTIONS
• PART II: WAYS OF HANDLING PROJECTIONS
• Appendix
• References
• Index