The Fascinating Process of Projection:

            I was listining to the news ( The Europen Chanel) when I heard the announcer saying something about the war in the  Eukrain. He came to an unimportant issue and said, "So let Mr. Putin feel good about that". This kind of comment does not fit in almost any official TV station in all the countries of Europe. The NEWS is something and the comments on the news are something else.  However, at that moment my struggle with the concept of projection came back to me with a wish to revisit it. The reason is that I always had difficulty using a concept of an individual connotation to explain a social phenomenon. A Ukranian who has difficulty with his boss and projects his qualities to justify hating him should not project his personal hate on Russia or Russians. For a simple reason, his psychological nature is not the psychological nature of a whole nation. I can say that I and my friends are such and such, but to say that all Canadians must be like me or us is annulling the personal quality of psychical issues. In a nutshell, social dynamics are not the same as psychodynamics. In every projection that an individual initiates there is a great part of him in it. Thus, every projection is a personal psychological event.

            The TV announcer assumed and maybe rightly so that all people hate Putin, but he could not say that they hate him for the same reasons. He projected his hate for him but did not pay attention that Putin is "a signifier in his mind and not a signified",i.e., Putin signifies different things and different degrees of hateful things or te same way. However, when Lacan made an issue of the distinction between signifier\signifide he actually gave the hint of the distinction between thing and its connotation, subject and issue that pertain to the suject, and most of all perception and projection. To get to the point directly: is Putin a subject or a connotation? Is Ukraine a coronation or a subject? In psychoanalysis proper, the subject is perception (like the Pope of Rome) and a connotation (like piety and holines).  Therefore, Putin started as a 'perceived' object and eventually became a coonotation and the target of projection (s). 

               What is fascinating about Projection is its inevitability, always "always" originating from the subject and not from the object. Our psychological life is stemming from projections (some are better than others), and will be in the degree of deviation from the object thta is formulating its connotation. Lately, I was reading something very detailed about WWII. I compared my image of Hitler then (Age 8-9) and after reading and knowing about the Versailles Treaty. Two totally different projections. I conclude this paragraph with psychoanalytic ( Lacanian) notions: the notion of the other is never simple perception, because perception without projection is void of connotation.

               I will venture and mention something that I cannot substantiate. Love is never pure love but a mixture of object \ and projection. Love is also a tricky process of projection. It is tricky because there is more of the subject in it than what the object contributed to the feeling. In Arabic literature, there is the expression "love from first sight". The wise- man said the cure for that mistake is a second look. Therefore, we are in a better place if we could differentiate between the object and its subject, between perception and projection, and between the object and its connotaion. So, that TVannouncer should have come up with his own perception of the news he is reading instead of projecting firstly on the other.

                How much we ignore or just trivialize what we come to assess our psychicical life. and how how much prijection is ther in that reagrd. We do not do that intentionally but we use prejudgment as an excuse for our prejudes.  I am saying that in relation to succoming to the medias impact on our judgement.