Soul, Psyche, Projection

In the early 20th century both Freud and Jung noted that projections of our deep emotions of fear and desire, our wishes for nurturance and ambitions for power ceased to be directed to the heavens and the God of various religious traditions. That human striving and loving fell out of the heavens. Where did all that energy go?  Freud saw this as liberation from religious tradition and its restrictive thinking. What we need is “secular ministers of the soul” (Bettleheim 1982, 35). Jung referred to himself as “a psychiatrist (“doctor of soul”) (1963, 349). The issue was not to get rid of religion but for people to see the link between sacred images of religions and “equivalent images lying dormant in their own unconscious….to facilitate this inner vision we must first clear the way  for the faculty of seeing…making contact with the psyche.”(CW12 12). Both retained the idea of soul, and added the necessity of psyche. Projection is as basic to psyche as breathing is to the body. We will explore in lecture and discussion six meanings of projection, drawing on selected psychoanalytic theorists emphasizing Jung’s distinct contributions to understanding dissolution and integration of projection of personal material, and  how projections of archetypal material must find a collective location.