“These resistances are usually bound up with projections, which are not recognized as such, and their recognition is a moral achievement beyond the ordinary.”

What does it mean?

Projection, here, is the form resistance takes. What will not be owned shows up as a fact about someone else, and seeing that this has happened is, he says, a moral achievement beyond the ordinary. The mainstream reading treats that as the working definition: the other person carries what the ego will not. A competing reading hears a trick for dismissing every criticism as projection, which he does not license. Some traits, he has just said, can be recognised as one's own without this machinery. The sentence is paragraph 16 of Aion. Recognition is the achievement. Blame-shifting is the symptom.

Did Carl Jung really say this?

The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Hull's English of paragraph 16. He has just said that some shadow traits can be seen as one's own, and that others resist because the emotion seems to belong entirely to the other person.

Where it comes from

Collected Works, volume 9 part ii, Aion, paragraph 16, R. F. C. Hull's translation

Approximate date: 1951; this English in the Collected Works.

How to use it

In a Bristol team row, notice the sentence that begins 'they always' and feels too complete to question. Ask whether any of that trait has a life in you. If the answer is no, the criticism can stand. The paragraph is a question, not a veto on other people.

A mindset reading

Calling something a projection is itself easy to fake. He reserves the word achievement for the recognition, which is rarer than the accusation.

Understand the philosophy

Paragraph 16 follows the shadow paragraphs. The key term is projection, an unconscious transfer onto the other person. The moral-problem sentence is paragraph 14. The slogan about resisting and persisting is not this paragraph, and it is marked separately as not his.

Related

• “The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort.”

  Paraphrase or translation

• “To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.”

  Paraphrase or translation

• “What is suppressed comes up again in another place in altered form, but this time loaded with a resentment that makes the otherwise harmless natural impulse our enemy.”

  Paraphrase or translation

Related bias. Confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, remember, and accept what supports a view you already like, and to skim past what would hurt it. It is not a claim that every belief is stubborn. It is a pattern in how attention is spent.

Practise the nine skills