PROJECTION

Projection is a process by which the person experiences something within himself as being outside or coming from outside towards him. Thus, in dreams and hallucinations the person projects, sees, hears, senses things in the outside world, while in reality all of it comes from inside.

In the psychoanalytic sense projection is a defence mechanism, an unconscious psychic operation whereby qualities, feelings, wishes, and so on, which the person refuses to recognise or to accept in himself, are expelled from the self and attributed to another person or thing (Laplanche et al., 1973, p. 349). In other words, projection is a defence against what we cannot make conscious or cannot bear in ourselves. It appears most clearly in paranoia.

Projection is not the same as transference. When a patient relates to the therapist as if the latter were his mother, he unwittingly transfers his early relationship with mother onto the new relationship. To do this he unconsciously allows his mother-image to fuse with his image of the therapist.

http://www.net.klte.hu/~keresofi/psy...bk40index.html