Moral Judgment and Projection
Skills learned in therapeutic analysis involve the ability to detect projections, including the ability to distinguish one’s own counter projections from those incoming. Another is to realize what your real desires or intentions are which may reveal one’s own self deception, e.g. false consciousness, false self, shadow, etc. Whether knowledge of your true desire permits you to change is a different story.
These skills involve very careful and subtle distinctions that are mostly below the threshold level of conscious awareness and must be sensed in altered states: dreams, sleep, reverie, etc.
Talking only works with people who can be asked questions, or “confronted,” and who respond genuinely.
Projection occurs following the splitting process of my good self and bad self, what is categorized as me and not me, and from assessments of others as good or bad.
This dimension of personality relates to earlier experiences, situations and social conditions. Attributing splitting and the projection of the negative qualities to a virtue deficiency is counter-projection.
There is no way of defending oneself in the moment unless the subject projects back especially if the other is a destructive narcissist, borderline or bipolar. However, during reflection or the 'analytic attitude,' which is not an altered state but is different from an attending and responding position, from “social” behavior, you can absorb and interpret the other’s behavior and mental/feeling state to understand what happened. This may help to secure a finer and stronger boundary. Ultimately, the other needs to question their feelings and thoughts, their object relations and realize what they are doing, eg intruding, overconforming or renouncing, not recognizing or demeaning others because prejudice is unconscious!
Intuition is a concept fleshed out by mentioning skills, techniques or even theoretical orientations.
Social interaction, behavior and talk but these are largely controlled by situation, structures, setting and power hierarchies or roles. Addressing the psychological situation over a period of time can define personality, object relations, and patterns.
There is a gap between thinking-feeling and moral judging. Kohlberg measured degrees of moral adequacy, Gilligan found gender differences and many researchers have explored nuances of morality; most people think it’s a given, they were born with their moral precepts and everyone knows what morals are! This nativist view is deeply mythical and full of error because values change historically. For example, in many fields morality is utterly irrelevant: wars, the street, family life, organizations where money and power arbitrarily determine thinking, feeling and judgments.
Projecting proceeds from splitting. Projecting in its functional and benign form involves signaling to communicate. Often projecting is attacking in some way - recognizing that one is being attacked may involve a subtle and careful reflection on one’s feelings and thoughts.
The most insidious form of projection is possessiveness. This is taken for granted however because most people are following myths unconsciously. Myths are beliefs about the way things were in the past, often the distant past. The family triangles, the similarity between peer and sibling roles, and the generalization of family roles and assumptions, i.e. that all people do is family, speaks to the relevance of notions like the universality of the Oedipal Complex, or the myth of the primal father of the horde, and to the religious myths each is born into.
