There’s one person you can’t let slide. Everybody else in the room lets it go — they roll their eyes, they move on, they’ve forgotten about it by the time they get to the parking lot. You haven’t. Something about the way that person takes credit, or opens a sentence with “no offense, but,” goes into you like a splinter and stays there. Their name comes up in conversation and your voice changes, and the strange part is you can hear it changing while it happens. Then you’re driving home and the question arrives: why did I go that hard? Nobody else did.
That difference between your reaction and everyone else’s matters. The person may really be irritating. But when you react far harder than anyone else, it can be a sign that their behavior has touched something in you — a desire or anger of your own that you find hard to admit. So to understand why you stay angry for hours while everyone else moves on, you have to ask not only what they did, but why it hits you so hard.
Where does your mind put a feeling it can’t stand?
Some feelings belong to you and you still won’t look at them straight on. The small ugly jealousy when a friend gets the news you wanted for yourself. The mean, calculating thought you’d never say out loud to anybody. Anger that arrives at a size the situation obviously doesn’t deserve.
When a feeling is too uncomfortable to admit as your own, the mind may hand it to someone else — and then find it in them. It’s a bit like tossing your own garbage over the fence into the neighbor’s yard, then looking over the next morning and complaining about how filthy their yard is. You feel competitive but accuse a colleague of turning everything into a contest. You want attention but become preoccupied with how desperately someone else seeks it. You haven’t stopped seeing the competitiveness or the hunger for attention. You just see it in them, and only in them.
This is called projection. Your judgment of the other person feels completely true, partly because it may be true: they may really be competitive, or really hungry for attention. Projection doesn’t need you to make up something that isn’t there. It makes you stare at that trait in them, and keeps you from seeing the same thing in yourself.
I call this an uncomfortable truth. It isn’t pleasant to hear, and there’s no gentle way to say it. But you can’t see yourself without bearing that discomfort. You can recognize the feelings you’ve been handing to other people only as far as you can stand to know they’re yours. Not an inch past that.
What did Melanie Klein see in the first months of life?
The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein described in close detail what goes on in the mind of a very young baby. In her account, the first thing in that mind is terror.
Not fear of something in particular — not dogs or strangers or the dark. A baby has no strength, no words, and no way of making anything at all happen. What it has instead is the raw sense that it could simply stop existing. Blink out, gone, nothing left where it used to be. Klein called this annihilation anxiety. It isn’t a fear of dying the way you or I think about dying, as something that will happen someday. A baby has no sense of “later,” so hunger doesn’t feel like a delay it can wait out. It feels like the end of everything.
Terror like that is more than a baby can bear, and the baby’s mind finds a way to make it smaller.
To see how, you need one more piece: there’s also destructiveness inside the baby, and it isn’t mild — hot, wrecking, wanting to smash whatever is nearest. Klein never believed infants were sweet blank pages waiting to be written on. But the baby can’t accept that this fury is its own, any more than it can bear the terror. So the fury gets thrown out, away, into the first outside thing the baby has ever met: its mother’s breast, the one that feeds it. Psychoanalysts call that first outside thing the object — their word for whoever or whatever our feelings are aimed at.
This is how the terror gets smaller. The fury no longer seems to be inside the baby; now it seems to come at the baby from out there, from the breast. It’s a terrible bargain — the very breast that feeds it now feels threatening — but it is still easier to bear than the alternative. A baby is far too small and too new to hold the thought “this savagery is mine.”
Why does the fault always seem to be in someone else?
The habit of throwing out what we can’t bear stays with us into adulthood. In an adult, though, it doesn’t look like throwing anything. It looks like a confident judgment about someone, backed by a list of examples. And because you can list everything that person did, you never ask why this one fault takes up so much of your mind.
Here’s something that sounds backwards until you check it against your own life: the more badness you find in other people, the more of it may be quietly sitting in you.
Say “they’re all selfish” often enough, with enough conviction, and you make a rule without noticing you made it: selfishness is a thing other people have. So the next time you take the last of something without asking, the thought can’t arrive as “that was selfish of me.” It has to arrive as “I was in a hurry,” or “they didn’t really want it.” Once selfishness belongs only to other people, your own selfishness has no place to show openly, so you hide it more deeply — even from yourself. The more you hide it, the less of yourself you get to see.
That’s the real cost of saying “they’re all selfish.” The cost isn’t that you’re being unfair to them. You may be entirely right about them — plenty of people really are selfish, and saying so isn’t a crime. The cost is that you become harder to see. To yourself.
So who is the mature one here? Not the person with no dark side. Nobody is free of one, and anybody claiming otherwise is bluffing. The mature one is whoever can say, quietly and without making a show of it, “yeah, some of that is in me too.”
The sentence doesn’t feel good, and saying it fixes nothing on its own — it certainly won’t make you nicer by Tuesday. Saying it takes strength, though. You have to be able to think “some of that is in me” without it flattening you for the rest of the night — and then get up and finish the dishes. When you don’t have that strength yet, the mind falls back on what the baby did: throw it out, find it in someone else, feel better for an hour or so.
Why does a fight make you more certain instead of less?
Projection is also why fights break out in close relationships. Two people can do this to each other at the same time: each one places their own unwanted feelings on the other, and then finds them there. Each now sees the badness in the other person, so a clash is hard to avoid.
Now think of a fight of your own, and watch what happens to both of you as it heats up. You’d expect an argument to introduce a little doubt — more information, more of the other person’s side, more room to wonder. It does the opposite. The louder it gets, the more badly you need to prove the fault is theirs: “That’s not mine. You did this.” Every time you say it, you believe it a little more.
That’s why an argument about something small, like the dishes, so quickly stops being about the dishes. It turns into a contest over who the bad one is, and neither of you can afford to lose it.
By this point, each of you is treating a picture in your own head as the complete truth. Psychoanalysis calls this kind of picture a fantasy. In this sense a fantasy is not a lie you’ve made up. To you, the picture feels like plain fact, and that is what makes it so hard to shift. Your mind has arranged what happened so that the other person carries all the badness and you carry none of it. That is why nothing new gets through. Accepting even part of the other person’s side would mean admitting that some of the badness is yours, and that is exactly what the picture protects you from.
And the firmer that picture becomes, the less you can see of what’s inside you. So the next time you’re absolutely sure about somebody, the certainty itself is worth a second look.
Were you ever really alone, even as a newborn?
Here’s the heart of Klein’s idea, and it starts with something almost too obvious to notice.
Projection needs an object — someone or something to place the feeling in. You can’t throw something at someone who isn’t there. So if a newborn is already throwing its fury into the breast, then someone else is already in the baby’s world from the first weeks of life. The baby’s mind is turned toward its mother from the very beginning, long before it can recognize that the breast it knows belongs to a whole, separate person.
Klein followed this simple point all the way through, and it led her to disagree with Freud.
Freud had pictured the newborn as a sealed little world, wrapped up in itself, only bumping into other people later on. Klein said no. We don’t start out alone and then pick up relationships as a skill, the way we eventually pick up walking. We start out already in a relationship. The very first thing a baby ever does with its mind, it does toward somebody.
That’s where the term object relations comes from. It names this way of understanding people: a person begins life not alone, but in a relationship with an object — someone to aim feelings at. You were never a closed room that later grew a door.
Who got to you today?
You know exactly who. Bring that person to mind.
Name what you couldn’t stand about them, and keep it to a single word, because one word is more than enough. Selfish. Cold. Fake. Careless.
Then take the word — just the word, not the person, not the history, not the list of everything they’ve done — and ask yourself one question about it: Is any of this in me?
Now don’t try to answer it — I mean that seriously. If something surfaces on its own, fine, but don’t go hunting for it. Finding an answer matters less than the turn itself: the finger you’ve been pointing at them swings back toward you for one second. For that one second, the picture in your head — all the badness is theirs, none of it is mine — starts to crack. One crack is plenty for tonight.
References
- Klein, M. (1946). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99–110.
Related
- Regression Isn’t a Breakdown. Your Mind Is Just Going Home.
- I Get So Angry I Want to Break Everything, Including Me
Written by Kim Hyung-keun — Director, Seoul Addiction Psychology Institute · Director, Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis · Object relations psychotherapist and supervisor, 26 years in practice and teaching. Counselling Board