more on projections, from Carl Jung's book

[Guest guest]

In addition to shadow projections, a man is prone to have projections

of his female self, called anima, and a women have projections of her

male side, called animus. So perhaps Deepak's negative projections on

Sarah Palin are really his anima speaking, " Another way in which the

negative anima in a man's personality can be revealed is in waspish,

poisonous, effeminate remarks by which he devalues everything. Remarks

of this sort always contain a cheap twisting of the truth and are in a

subtle way destructive " (p. 179). The book goes on to say that the

most frequent manifestation of anima is in the form of erotic fantasy.

" All these aspects of the anima have the same tendency that we have

observed

in the shadow: That is, they can be projected so that they appear to

the man to be the qualities of some particular woman " (p. 180). There

can be positive expressions of the anima- they help a man find a good

marriage partner or possibly tune into higher values.

 

So you might say this is all malarkey (skip the manure reference) and

has nothing to do with me. But I think that when you over-idealize a

candidate, you could be projecting what's good inside of you onto a

potential demagogue. Likewise, when you savage a perfectly nice,

normal person, that's rather a negative bit of something inside of you

coming out.