Projections Change The World Into The

From Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962), p. 247. Projection, in Jung's framework, is the unconscious mechanism by which inner contents — desires, fears, qualities, the Shadow — are perceived as originating in external persons or objects rather than in oneself. The "unknown face" is the Shadow: the unacknowledged dimension of the personality that we cannot see directly but that distorts our perception of the world around us. The disturbing quality of the image — the world becoming a mirror for what we refuse to know about ourselves — is deliberate: Jung regarded unexamined projection as one of the primary sources of interpersonal conflict and collective violence.