|
Personal growth and spiritual development are based on honesty and integrity, and it’s only in intimate relationships that real honesty and integrity surface. Life with an intimate partner is no bowl of cherries, and you’ve got to be strictly honest with each other and recognize your unconscious projections onto each other and deal with them. If you don’t, you drift apart.
Q: What sort of “unconscious projections”?
Say, for example, something about the other person really annoys you. That annoying quality likely also exists in you, but you don’t know it, so you attack the other person for it. The quality that you hate in the other person is also something that you hate about yourself. That’s a negative projection. A positive projection can be something you admire in another person but unconsciously devalue in your own life. There are even qualities in others that we hate and admire at the same time. Whenever we refuse to accept something as a part of us, we project that something onto others. A projection is like an arrow that flies out of your unconscious and finds its mark in someone out there.
In an intimate relationship we are attracted by the positive projections and repelled by the negative. Neither set of images, however, is grounded in what’s really going on, because neither acknowledges or accepts the other person as he or she really is. In intimate relationships – especially ones that last – we are both attracted and repelled at the same time. We feel imprisoned in a way, and yet unable or unwilling to break free. These sorts of projections usually have to do with our mother and father, because most of us end up coupling with or marrying people like our parents.
Q: Why is that?
Because that’s our experience of family. It’s familiar to us, and we gravitate toward the familiar. We are bonded to our mother and father, whether through love or hate, and unconsciously seek out what we grew up with, because that is the reality we know and understand, whether we liked it or not. We often find ourselves living lives we swore we would never life.
Q: If both partners hated their parents growing up, I imagine it might cause some major problems in the relationship.
Unless those two people become involved with each other at a deep level, that relationship will not survive. If both partners want to stay together, they will have to go through this process of withdrawing their projections and growing into a mature love: no more daddy and mommy in the relationship. Each person will have his or her own reality, and reality is sometimes not all that exciting. But if you’re able to accept the reality and the beauty of this other human being, then you’ve got a real marriage.
When we recognize our projections for what they are, we see how we are giving away our energy to other people. But that energy is also the source of the romantic bond, so there is a terrible aloneness when a projection collapses. A person who doesn’t want to know him- or herself isn’t going to go through the agony of withdrawing his or her projections. In some cases the projections are simply too loaded to unpack. In other cases the partners don’t want to do the work. So the relationship fails. But they’re both going to find themselves in the same situation again with different partners.
When we stick with someone, we know there’s going to be fighting; there are going to be situations that will require immense patience; and there are going to be huge disappointments. But individuation – finding one’s true self – cannot occur without relationship. Jung pointed out that our projections are like treasures that we believe other people have and that we want badly for ourselves. Withdrawing our projections lets us claim those treasures. But you will never come into possession of them, Jung said, if you keep running around like a wild dog.
The most difficult task each of us faces is the smashing of our infantile projections. Real sexuality is an expression of mature love; it separates the strong masculine and strong feminine from the child’s love for a parent. As I said, most of us couple with or marry someone who reminds us of our mother or father. The real trouble begins when we realize we have re-created, at least in part, our parents’ marriages. That’s also where the real work starts, and the real love.
-- Marion Woodman, interviewed by James Kullander in The Sun
|
