Ceremony is Essential to Good Health
How society could be changed if people understood projection
On the local television news this morning, an outdoor BBC crew filmed two teenage girls and then a middle-aged South African couple on this, an auspicious Friday the 13th, the day the Conservative government tightened its screws on parliament and the people of the British Isles.
These interviews have been standard fare in the buildup to these elections. The girls, the first still too young to vote and her companion who voted Labour, spoke of their fears for the future, the environment and outed the red herring that is the Brexit obsession.
The older couple, now settled here, said they wanted a strong grip on immigration and to feel safe. They had moved from the violence of their homeland to Britain to feel safe and equated immigrants — like them but clearly not somehow — as the problem.
Although they had come to Britain for a new life, they had brought their projections with them. The girls on the other hand, instead of projecting shadow qualities, were looking into the future — an alternate meaning of the term projection — and not seeing one worth having.
The difference was striking: the young still not burdened by their own shadow but rather the one being denied by those in power; the old consumed by fears they were still running from.
It seems to me the young are calling for action while their elders are in reaction.
Projection is a dangerous and disturbing mechanism and seems directly proportionate to the repressed material — in the shadow bag as Robert Bly put it — we carry deep within ourselves or within a society.
The power of projection is amply illustrated by the demonizing of a whole race during the Second World War and the scapegoating of individuals who rock the boat, or frighten those gripping on to power.
We have all seen how easily America demonized individuals and nations after 9/11 and all the consequent horrors that wrought, and today in Britain we saw how one simple catchphrase, ‘Get Brexit Done’, worked to harness a beleaguered population.
Like Trump before him, Johnson’s populist agenda, has fooled the poor into believing he is really on their side.
Part of that process was an intense media vilification of the Labour leader, much glossing over of the desperate personal failings of our old Etonian PM, and another sad chapter in the manipulation of the poor to accede to their oppressors.
It was once said that Marilyn Monroe was killed by the projections of others, setting her in an impossible role, one which she could never fulfil.
We can project both our positive qualities on to others — our golden shadow — like when we fall in love; and we can project our denied dark and hateful feelings. Both are ultimately destructive, unless we can become conscious of our shadow and claim its qualities, then we can stop projecting them.
I once had a girlfriend who was disdainful that, as she saw it, I reveled in my shadow qualities. She was wrong in her accusation. I may have seemed to revel in them but really I was making them conscious to avoid passing them to others, not always successfully I might add.
What she was really saying was that she was ashamed of her own shadow and thus my seeming comfort with mine disturbed her.
On the booklist of many psychotherapy and counselling trainees is the book Dibs in Search of Self, the story of a confused and bewildered young boy’s experience in play therapy.
Virginia Axline, the book’s author and a wise therapist, allowed him within the boundaries of the therapeutic setting to express the hateful, murderous feelings he felt towards his father whom he symbolically buried and destroyed in the sandpit where he could outlet his rage and pain.
He grew into a successful and popular young man, championing the causes he believed in, known for his courage, solely because he learned to deal with his shadow bag at a tender age.
That could not be said for most of us who unwittingly carry the burdens of the past, our long-held confusions, the mixed messages of family and society and our culture’s disdain for all ‘bad’ feelings. There are no bad feelings of course, just those that have grown bitter from never seeing the light of day, of never finding acceptance.
‘All healthy societies have a rich ceremonial life,’ asserts Robert A Johnson in his book Owning Your Own Shadow, in which he proselytizes on behalf of those of us who need ritual and a symbolic life — just like Dibs in his sandpit — in order to live well and become whole.
Because the psyche cannot tell the difference between the real and the symbolic — largely because its own language is symbol — the proper acting out of our shadow can be enormously healing.
Traditional indigenous societies are much better at it than we are for they still understand its import.
One of the chief benefits of having a monarchy is that ordinary people get the chance to be part of ceremony and ritual — albeit acted out by others — which satisfies something deep within the human psyche and probably prevents a mutiny!
As Johnson writes: ’As the shadow is drawn up into consciousness, it becomes softer, more pliable, more gentle.’ Ceremony soothes and satisfies, calms temperatures and relieves the pressure on the psyche.
There is nothing like a Royal wedding to keep the people in line, to feel part of something bigger than themselves with a nod to all their own denied golden qualities carried by the crown bearer and the ennobled.
Equally, when the shadow is denied and projected, both an individual leader and his society can become dangerously deranged and out of control, as all can now witness in Trump’s America. Those, like the president himself, who remain out of touch with their shadow, have little choice in their determined denial but to project and persecute.
With the travails of Prince Andrew we are witnessing for the first time perhaps the failure of our projections to uphold the fantasy and suddenly a member of the Royal family is carrying not a golden shadow projection but something far darker.
His former wife yesterday was reported as saying how much he is now suffering. He will be, for like Marilyn Monroe before him, no human is built to carry the shadow of a whole community, let alone the whole world.
The witch burnings of yesteryear testify to that.
More often than not though it is the truth teller, the one society is still not ready or willing to hear who gets burdened with our darker projections.
In the TV series Vikings, the importance of ritual and ceremony as a means of dealing with shadow qualities, is portrayed with great understanding, at least to my inexperienced eye.
Today, we don’t need to be so brutal in our acknowledgment of the darkness we all carry, but sometimes a simple ritual can save us a lot of bother.
It is quite possible last night’s election could have gone a very different route if ordinary citizens were privy to their own projections and diluted them in symbolic acts rather than seeing others as the enemy.
© Simon Heathcote
