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Defenses

Projection

Projection is seeing your own unwanted feelings, impulses, or thoughts in someone else instead of in yourself. The feeling doesn’t disappear. It gets relocated. You stop noticing it in yourself and start noticing it, often intensely, in other people.

In the Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, the person “deals with emotional conflicts, or internal or external stressors, by falsely attributing his or her own unacknowledged feelings, impulses, or thought to others” (Di Giuseppe & Perry, 2021). The people chosen as targets are usually ones the person feels threatened by, and also feels some affinity with.

Projection protects against feelings that would make us feel too vulnerable, especially to shame or humiliation, if we admitted having them. The price is that we stay preoccupied with those same feelings in others.

Where It Sits

Projection belongs to Level 3, the Disavowal Defense Level, within the Immature Defensive Category. Disavowal defenses keep an unpleasant feeling, idea, or responsibility out of awareness. In the case of projection, it is pinned on someone else. The DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale places projection at the same disavowal level, alongside denial and rationalization.

Among the immature defenses, projection is grouped with the depressive defenses. Distress isn’t resolved; it is carried into relationships, where it shows up as blame, suspicion, and mistrust.

Compared with its neighbors:

How It Shows Up

Common signs, adapted from the items raters use to identify projection:

Examples

The secretive analyst

Anna Freud described a young patient who, in certain phases of treatment, accused her of being secretive and pressed her with personal questions. Those outbursts came exactly when the patient was holding back private material of her own. “She criticized the analyst for the very fault of which she herself was guilty.”

Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1937), pp. 125–126

The jealous husband

Anna Freud also described a husband who “displaces on to his wife his own impulses to be unfaithful and then reproaches her passionately with unfaithfulness.” She framed this as projection combined with introjection: he takes in her reproaches while pushing his own impulse onto her.

Anna Freud, The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1937), pp. 128–129

Peggy and the boys

George Vaillant illustrated defenses using a hypothetical 16-year-old, Peggy O’Hara, caught between her first romance and a strict upbringing. In Vaillant’s words: “‘It is a terrible thing,’ she could tell her girlfriends, ‘that men are such animals, so oversexed. Half the time they are undressing you with their eyes.’” Vaillant notes that this keeps the sexual feeling in view, but locates it in the boys, so that she doesn’t have to take responsibility for it.

George E. Vaillant, The Wisdom of the Ego (1993), pp. 45–46

How It Differs From Look-Alikes

Projective identification
In projection, the feeling is disowned and seen only in the other person. In projective identification, the person still feels it, justifies it as a response to the other, and often provokes the other into feeling it too. The DMRS calls projective identification “more extensive than simple projection.”
Displacement
Displacement keeps the feeling as your own and moves it to a safer target, like being angry at the dog instead of the boss. Projection hands the feeling itself to someone else: “I’m not angry, you are.”
Assuming others think like you
People commonly overestimate how many others share their views, which psychologists call the false-consensus effect (Ross, Greene & House, 1977). Unlike projection, this involves no denial: the person freely admits holding the view too.
Accurate perception
Noticing a feeling in someone who really has it isn’t projection. The defense involves falsely attributing the feeling, with no objective basis, while not recognizing it in yourself. The DMRS also specifies that it is describing non-delusional projection.

In Personality Styles

These personality styles count projection among their characteristic defenses:

History

Sigmund Freud first described projection in 1895, in a draft on paranoia enclosed with a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess. Paranoia, he wrote, fends off an idea incompatible with the ego “by projecting its substance into the external world,” an “abuse of the mechanism of projection for purposes of defence.”

In his 1911 study of the memoir of Daniel Paul Schreber, a judge who suffered from paranoia, Freud traced how an unacceptable feeling can be transformed, step by step, until “I hate him” becomes “He hates (persecutes) me, which will justify me in hating him.” In that same work he noted that ordinary, everyday projection also exists, and that “this normal proceeding, too, deserves to be called projection.”

Freud widened the idea in Totem and Taboo (1913): “projection was not created for the purpose of defence; it also occurs where there is no conflict.” He saw projecting inner perceptions outward as a primitive mechanism that also shapes ordinary perception.

Anna Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (German 1936; English 1937) listed projection among the core defenses of the ego.

In 1946 Melanie Klein extended the concept with projective identification, in which split-off parts of the self are projected onto another person.

Later, projection was formalized for research. It was included in the DSM-IV’s Defensive Functioning Scale (1994) and in J. Christopher Perry’s Defense Mechanism Rating Scales, which defines it and places it at the disavowal level.

Experimental social psychology has also tested the idea. Newman, Duff, and Baumeister (1997) found that people who try not to think about their own undesirable traits keep those traits mentally accessible, and so are quicker to see them in others. Reviewing the evidence, Baumeister, Dale, and Sommer (1998) concluded that “projection is evident,” though it may be a by-product of defense rather than the defense itself.

Sources