 Projection and Projectile. The archaic identity of subject and object, which is the basis of the phenomenon of projection, persists subliminally as mentioned above, even in highly cultivated men and women. In the unconscious, the inner world and the outer world are not differentiated. Only that which has become a content of consciousness is described as an inner or an outer phenomenon, that is either as an introspectively perceived condition, like the welling up of an emotion, or as an outer event or object. Everything else, of which we are not conscious, remains, as before, an undifferentiated part of the occurrences of life. This is why, as we said at the outset, one cannot speak of projection in a strict sense until a disturbance arises that necessitates the revision of a merely assumed perception or of a judgment that has been accepted without reflection. This disturbance finds expression as doubt or uncertainty or in a tendency to defend the previous judgment in an unrealistic way, precisely because its credibility is already undermined, from within or without. Since projection is a pre-conscious, involuntary process, independent of consciousness, it is to be expected that the process itself will be depicted in products of the unconscious, such as dreams, waking fantasies, and mythological traditions. This aspect will therefore be given special attention in what follows, so that the still open question of exactly where projections come from may perhaps be somewhat clarified. Whenever projection takes place, there is, first of all, a sender and a receiver. Interestingly enough, the motif of the sender, of the figure from whom magical effects emanate, is central to many myths, but even more frequently the motif of the one who is hit is at the core of the myth, which may often deal with the question of defense against such effects. These will be considered here, because this is an aspect of projection that seldom receives much attention in therapy at present. One of the oldest ways of symbolizing projection is by means of projectiles, especially the magic arrow or shot that harms other people. The oldest explanation for the causes of illness, to be found almost everywhere in the world, is of a projectile that affects its target for good or ill. It is generally believed that such a projectile is shot by a god, spirit, demon, or some other mythological being, or by an evil person, and that it hits people, and perhaps animals as well, causing them to fall ill. One is reminded of the original relation between the German kankheit, illness, and konken, to hurt or wound. Whether the archer who shoots the arrow should be regarded as inner or outer is a question better left, until the material at hand has been examined more closely. Lauri Honko, in his book Kankheitsprojektile, has supplied an abundant collection of documentary evidence to which we shall refer. In ancient Judaism there is the idea that God, also the devil in the New Testament, and or evil human beings, sent forth harmful arrows. In Psalm 91 there is the passage, You will not fear the terror of the night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in darkness, nor the destruction that wastes at noonday. Job's plague was also caused by Yahweh's arrows. For the arrows of the Almighty are in me, my spirit drinks their poison, the terrors of God are arrayed against me. Job chapter 6 verse 4. But the evil harmful words of human beings are also described as arrows. Deceitful men bend their tongue like a bow, falsehood and not truth has grown strong in the land. Their tongue is a deadly arrow, it speaks deceitfully. Jeremiah chapter 9 verses 3 and 8. They aim bitter words like arrows shooting from ambush at the blameless. Psalm 64 verses 3 and 4. That these quotations refer to effective, columnius activities of human beings, and that such activities, as we learn from practical psychological experience, are triggered by negative projections is clear enough. As soon as a person projects a bit of his shadow onto another human being, he is incited to this kind of rankerous speech. The words, barbs, punches, that hit the other person like projectiles, symbolize the negative flow of energy directed against the other by the one who is projecting. When one becomes the target of another person's negative projection, one often experiences that hatred almost physically as a projectile. It is more difficult to understand the arrows of a God, or of God, as representing projections, and yet the dispatch of arrows bringing sickness or death is ascribed to divine figures with special frequency. In ancient Vedic literature, the God Rudra sends death and illness with his arrows, as we read in the Brigh Veda. To Rudra I bring thee songs whose bow is firm and strong, with swiftly flying shafts, armed with sharp pointed weapons. May he hear our call. He through his lordship thinks on beings of the earth, on heavenly beings, heal all sickness. Thou very gracious God hast thousand medicines, inflict no evil on our sons or progeny. Rudra's arrows could produce fever, coughing, malignant tumors, and stabbing pains. Whereas today all these illnesses are considered to be physical, the word arrowhead, or arrow point, was also used in the Brigh Veda to indicate the cause of purely psychic disturbances. The Indic word sallia means arrowhead, thorn, splinter. In one text it is said of the doctor who removes such an object from the body of a patient that he is, like a judge who in a trial pulls out the thorn of injustice. Here the arrow is something like a bad effect that has led to illness out of uncertainty about the justice of a situation. Today we know that sharp jabbing forms in the drawings of patients indicate evil, wounding, destructive impulses that stand in the way of a synthesis of the personality. When in mythological representations arrows of this kind are sent by gods, not by evil humans, these destructive impulses regarded psychologically are produced by unconscious archetypal contents. Spears and arrowheads are symbolic expressions of direction, the directedness of psychic energy as has been established in countless drawings by patients. In the mythology of classic antiquity Apollo and Artemis were especially noted for sending death and disease via their arrows. Thus Apollo sent a plague to the army attacking Troy, Iliad Book I, line 43 and following, because Agamemnon had insulted one of his priests. In Roman renderings Apollo and Mars dispatch arrows of disease. Arrows from a god, however, produce not only sickness and death, sudden seizures of passionate love also come from the arrows of the god Aros, Cupid Amor. Suddenly falling passionately in love is also experienced as rather like a sickness in that one pines away or languishes. In Indian mythology the love-god Kama is armed with bow and arrow, and Buddha describes the erotic wish as an arrow. But if those sensual pleasures fail the person who desires and wishes for them he will suffer pierced by the arrow of pain. In late antiquity the suspicion had already risen that certain gods might have something to do with the way in which emotions work in human beings, a view that was especially furthered by astrological speculations. Thus Saturn has something to do with a melancholy turn of mind, Mars with aggression and initiative, Venus and Cupid with love and sexuality, all states of mind or moods that strike people suddenly and overwhelmingly, and for a time can subjugate the conscious ego. The symbol of the arrow is a visual expression of being suddenly hit by a mood or an emotion that often strikes one like lightning out of a blue sky. The gods are representations of certain natural constants of the unconscious psyche, of the ways in which the emotional and imaginative elements of the personality behave. As is well known, Jung described these constants as archetypes. These are innate irreparable structures that always and everywhere on suitable occasions produce similar thoughts, mythological images, feelings and emotions in human beings, parallel to the instincts, those impulses to action that are characteristic of the human species. These archetypal symbol forms were in principle assumed to exist in a visible material or invisible spiritual outer world, but the notion that they issued from an inner psychic space unknown to man gradually took hold in late antiquity. This led to an interesting new conception of human personality that Isidor, the son of the Gnostic facilities, handed down to us, namely that the human being or alternatively his ego also possesses a prosphys psyche, a soul that has grown on to him and belongs to a species of animal souls, like those of wolves, monkeys and lions. These represent effective states that seduce a man into evil deeds against his will. The Gnostic Valentinas, on the other hand, suspected that such appendages, prosartamata, might also consist of invading spirits. These spirits, numata, seduce the human being into indecent desires by bewildering him or confusing him with images of lust, as with a fog of evil. While the animal souls tend to depict the more instinctual aspect of the unconscious, those of the spirits and the gods appear to represent the more archetypal, that is, the more spiritual contents of the unconscious, although the two realms overlap a good deal as to their significance, which is not surprising in view of the close relationship of spirit and instinct, which will be discussed later. When an archetype is immediately and intensively constellated, the experience is like being hit by a projectile sent by an overpowering being that transfixes us and brings us into its power. At the same time we are assailed by fantasies and imaginary images experienced either as proceeding directly from the inner world, for example, as an obsessive idea, or more often as caused by an outer object. An attack of aggressive hatred, for example, is felt by us as coming not from Mars, but rather from an evil adversary who deserves to be hated, Shadow Projection, erotic passion not from Cupid, but from a woman who arouses this passion in a man, Anima Projection. Ultimately, however, it appears that projections always originate in the archetypes and in unconscious complexes. Dreams can substantiate this even more precisely. Thus a woman dreamed that an unknown figure said to her, You have romantic, dreamy blue eyes. The dream figure had such eyes, while the dreamer herself has lively gray green eyes. One must conclude from this that the dream figure projects onto the dreamer's ego a quality that belongs to the unknown figure and not to the ego complex. The unknown dream figure, however, would be an as yet unconscious partial personality, a complex of the dreamer, of whose existence she has hitherto known nothing. Nor apparently does the dream figure know herself, and she therefore projects her own image onto the dreamer's ego, probably with the intention of inducing the ego to see herself as dreamily romantic and thus to identify with the complex. Presumably this happens in the interest of integration. When other people project positive or negative qualities onto us, this often produces a certain ego insecurity. We no longer know whether we really have such splendid or such ugly traits or not, especially since there is almost always a hook on which the projection is hung. If in addition our own unconscious complexes can cast such projections onto our ego, as the above dream shows, this can lead to a further source of mistaken judgments by the ego about itself. Sometimes it really seems as if bewildering imaginary images were buzzing all around one, as Democritus once expressed it. As he saw it, the outer world is filled not only with atoms, but also with animated images, which he called demons or spiritual principles. These idola, or deonetikai fantasy, can harm us or help us. They appear with special clarity in dreams but also float around us during the day as fantasy images. Only a subtle spirit, says Democritus, can tell them apart. Whereas ordinary human beings confuse these fantasy images with concretely perceived objects. Small wonder, then, that one needs a long process of maturing and a good bit of self-knowledge before coming to a relatively constant ego-identity, and a moderate level-headed estimate of oneself. The attribution of a psychic content in another person's imagination to one's own being, or its rejection as the other's projection, is an occasion not only for critical thinking, but also for a feeling evaluation. It can therefore never be managed purely intellectually.