Psychoanalysis

Negative Appraisals And Projection

By  | 

“This is stupid.” “This is boring.” “This doesn’t make any sense.” These demeaning appraisals and others like them might be motivated by honest, authentic reflection but they’re much more likely to be projections.

A projection is a defense mechanism whereby that which cannot or will not be accepted in Self is externalized onto something else so that a quality that is actually felt to belong to Self is attributed to some external entity instead.

If people were being really honest with themselves, then rather than instantly demeaning some object they’d note a rising sense of frustration, anxiety, and other unwanted thoughts and feelings, all formulated under barely conscious but extremely discomfiting headings like “I’m stupid.” “I’m boring.” “I can’t understand this.”

These negative self-evaluations are obviously extremely uncomfortable, intolerable really, for anyone who isn’t masochistic. So it makes a lot of psychological sense to want to get rid of that psychic burden. What better way than to transfer ownership of those negative self-appraisals, to make an external object responsible for them instead?

When we look a little deeper we see there is a third and much better way than negative self-appraisal or projection and this is simply recognizing that in any endeavor of substance there will always be struggle, there will always be push back, things aren’t going to be smooth and easy from start to finish. If the object in question were not difficult to master then pursuing it would be a waste of time. There’s not necessarily anything deficient about Self or the external object, there’s only a learning period where frustration, anxiety, and other unwanted states show up from time to time. Getting down on Self or projecting away the feeling onto the object are both counterproductive, they chip away at energy, focus, and dedication. The key then is to recognize the projection as it’s happening, take back ownership of those projected thoughts and feelings, and finally challenge their validity.

Related posts:

  1. Replacing Negative Self-Talk With Positive Self-Talk The antidote for negative self-talk is positive self-talk. Simple, right? Objectively speaking it is simple, but the problem is that people mistake their subjective biases for objective reality. In the context of this article they mistake their negative self-talk for fact. They think of it like an incontrovertible report from an outside authority rather than […]...
  2. Depression And Negative Self-Appraisals Negative self-appraisals are a common feature of depression. Most people who are depressed report feelings of guilt, worthlessness, low self esteem, and deficient abilities and intelligence. The question is whether the depression causes these beliefs or these beliefs cause the depression. It’s the classic paradox of what came first between the chicken and the egg. The […]...
  3. Combating Low Self-Esteem The challenge in combating low self-esteem is that self-esteem is itself ephemeral. It’s a feeling, a state of mind, an orientation towards people and the world that might be very real but remains difficult to pin down, difficult to define. But what is not difficult to pin down or define is the automatic negative thinking, […]...
  4. Mind Reading Faulty Thinking Pattern Mind Reading is a faulty thinking pattern that we are all guilty of engaging in sometimes. It’s when we are sure of the thoughts of those around us without any concrete evidence. Mind reading is turning speculation, an educated guess, into an ironclad truth. Trying to put ourselves in the shoes of others, to guess […]...
  5. Repression And Projection Repression and projection can kind of be thought of as the yin and yang of defense mechanisms. They’re the two most common ways to keep what can’t or won’t be accepted from entering conscious awareness. Taken as a whole they do a pretty solid job of temporarily unburdening the ego from the various aspects of […]...
  6. Projection Of Positive Qualities We usually think of projection as the psychic act of unloading undesirable qualities onto a scapegoat. People, structures, institutions, and ideas are made to be the bearers of these undesirable qualities, whereby the person doing the projecting is freed from the discomfort of accepting them as his own. But actually projection as a psychic act […]...
  7. Pay Attention To Projection You can learn an extraordinary amount of information about the underlying drives and motivations of someone, not to mention their typical behavior when you aren’t around to witness it, simply by sitting back and paying close attention to how this person characterizes other people, groups, and structures. The reason why is that while consciously these […]...
  8. Projection and Compassion The natural outgrowths of ignorance are fear, hatred, and violence. The natural outgrowth of understanding is compassion. A very useful idea to increase understanding is the psychoanalytic concept of projection. It’s a defense mechanism where we unconsciously try to place our own undesirable thoughts, motivations, or feelings onto others. The most undesirable feeling that exists […]...
  9. Projection Projection is one of the most useful concepts in psychoanalytic theory. It is a mechanism where we project what we can’t or won’t see in ourselves onto the people or structures around us. This gives us psychic relief, usually in the form of anxiety reduction, since we don’t have to deal with the qualities that […]...
  10. Projection In Gestalt We have talked about the importance of completing the needs satisfaction cycle in various aspects of your life in order to feel a sense of wholeness. In this framework psychological distress is often the result of unconsciously being unable to move from one stage to the next. Gestalt psychologists call the mechanisms we use to […]...
  11. Poisonous Actions And Projection People who say and do poisonous things, whose destructive words and actions make others suffer, are trying to purge themselves of their own psychic poison, of their own suffering. We’ve written a lot about projection, which is the psychological mechanism wherein aspects of Self that can’t or won’t be accepted are placed onto some other […]...
  12. Negative Self-Talk Negative self-talk is the abusive running conversation you have going on with yourself about yourself. We call it abusive because you put yourself down, make yourself feel less, and characterize yourself as having negative traits, of being basically worthless. Sometimes you make these comments out loud but they are also a jumble of thoughts and […]...
  13. Stop The Negative Self-Talk It’s strange but true that when thinking about humanity, we usually don’t include ourselves in the discussion. If you think of the person who spends the most time around you, who has the most significant impact on your thoughts and feelings, and who is most responsible for your overall self-concept, you’ll have to conclude that […]...
  14. Negative Reactions To The Homeless We are going to talk about the internal reaction of disgust and external reaction of hostility or indifference that many people have when they come into contact with people who are homeless. We will explore this topic from an existential and psychodynamic point of view. Some people claim that it’s the annoying imposition of being […]...
  15. Example Of Negative Self-Talk If you’re a fan of the the sitcom ‘Friends’ you might remember an early episode where there’s a power outage across New York and Chandler ends up getting stuck in an ATM vestibule with a beautiful woman. Throughout the episode we are privy to not just their interactions but also to his internal monologue, which […]...
  16. The Vicious Cycle of Negative Self-Talk Negative self-talk is the abusive running conversation you have going on in your own head about yourself. If you engage in a lot of negative self-talk then you are your own worst critic, you’re a lot harder on yourself than anyone else is on you. You’re probably also a lot harder on yourself than you […]...
  17. Catching Negative Self-Talk In The Moment A mean spirited, vicious little troll has taken up residence in your psyche. This troll is critical of pretty much everything you do. He’s harder on you than maybe anybody else in your life right now. We all want to be happy. Happiness is the purported goal of life for most people. But how can […]...
  18. Changing Automatic Negative Thinking Automatic negative thinking could be said to occur unconsciously if we were working within in a psychoanalytic framework but this article channels CBT so we’ll just say that it happens so fast and seems so natural as it’s occurring that it doesn’t feel like thinking at all, it just feels like the way things are. […]...
  19. Automatic Negative Thinking And Depression Arguing about the cause of depression is a little bit like arguing about what came first between the chicken and the egg. On one hand you have psychologists who believe that changes in mood cause negative thoughts about the self, world, and future while on the other hand you have psychologists who believe that negative […]...
  20. Difference Between Negative Reinforcement And Punishment A question that always pops up in behavioral psychology is what the difference is between negative reinforcement and punishment. The confusion is understandable because both forms of control have aversive stimuli embedded within them, in other words something that the organism wants to avoid. Where they differ then is in their consequences. Punishment tries to […]...
Related Items