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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 27 Dec 2022

Taken: 27 Dec 2022

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OF FEAR AND STRANGERS •
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George Makari •

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Projection

Projection

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 Dinesh
Dinesh club

Projection and the Negative of Love

As Americans pursued behaviorism and cognitive stereotypes in the hopes of solving the riddle of xenophobia, Europeans followed alternative strategies. After all, there was much room to differ. Behaviorism featured actions without actors, while psychologies of the stereotype were models of thought shorn of thinkers. In Europe, those absences seemed glaring and would be taken up.

In Western and Central Europe, models of the mind emerged that focused on the concept of “projection.” Projection was an old idea and, at first blush, rather simple. We stare out at complex, ambiguous realities and unwittingly discover feelings, ideas, attributes, and identities ‘out there’ that actually emanate from our own minds. The pre-Socratic philosopher Xenophanes of Colophon may have been the first Westerner to recognize this human proclivity. And exiled itinerant, he noticed that when Homer or Hesiod described the gods, they bore a great resemblance of the authors themselves. Since then, many -- from Plato to the post-Kantian idealists -- have observed how we clothe the outer world in our own predilections, how we falsely and unwittingly generalize from our own condition.

The original theory of projection did not account for xenophobia, but rather its opposite. . . . . By willingly seeing ourselves in others, we flatten our differences and turn those who may be quite distinct into beings no different from ourselves. Numerous thinkers saw romantic love, the national family, and other collectives as derived from Xenophanic projection. “Sympathy,” ad deployed by eighteenth-century thinkers from Adam Smith to Jean_Jacques Rousseau, and the nineteenth-century German idea of “empathy,” that process of feeling one’s way into another, both held at their core the kind of projection that can be boiled down to this “I am like you.” ~ Page 175

OF FEAR AND STRANGERS
16 months ago. Edited 16 months ago.

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