Once there was a miserable couple. They hardly spoke and slept in separate rooms. Every day the man would reluctantly chop wood, making sure to splinter it up beyond use and every day the woman would cook biscuits making sure to burn them a little. One day, whilst splintering the logs, the man decided he’d had enough. He dug the axe blade deep into the chopping block and walked out of the garden gate, down the hill, into the town. There he caught a boat and sailed the seven seas for a decade or more. One year his boat moored up in his old home town. He walked through the town, climbed the hill and lifted the rusty latch on the garden gate. He pulled the axe out of the block where it was still wedged, splintered some wood and went into the cottage. His wife was stood in the kitchen. ‘There’s your wood!’ he said aggressively. Without looking up she reached for a plate of something dark and mouldy, thrusting them down onto the table with a crash, ‘And there’s your biscuits’.
Why do people stay in unhappy relationships? Is it because they both believe they can save the other? Or be saved by them? Or ‘make them see’? Is it ‘for the sake of the kids’? Beneath such reasons there is invariably something darker, less available for consideration, more painfully uncomfortable to face. It’s what you are used to. It’s the devil that you know. Beneath the desire to save or rescue, beyond the kick of emotional intensity mistaken for intimacy, or the despairing reluctance to start over, is the compulsive repetition of familiarity’s hard wiring.
But there’s another layer still. It’s so simple it’s easy to miss, yet so obvious that when you say it out loud you wonder how it got evaded for so long. Preoccupation with the other’s issues, remonstrating with their idiosyncrasies and focusing on their problems means you don’t have to confront your own. You can stay with, ‘she let me down’, rather than the more corrosive, ‘I chose badly’. ‘Why does she treat me that way?’, is easier than ‘why do I let myself be treated like that?’ The poor me of, ‘how can she behave like that?’, is more comforting than, ‘why do I tolerate it?’
When the mirror is held up like this something profoundly uncomfortable happens. You realise that what you thought of as projection is way more complex than at first appears. Generally we tend to think of projection as limited to the shadow, the attribution to the other of all one’s own ‘negative’ traits, hate, anger, greed. But projection is about more than ridding oneself of inferior qualities. It is primarily about preserving the status quo. To that end we are just as likely to project our depth, wisdom, and inner gold if it serves the purpose of preserving psychic equilibrium.
So there is actually a twofold process happening with the stuck and unhappy couple. On the one hand, focusing on the speck in the other’s eye means being able to ignore the beam in your own. Alongside this however, and at the other end of the spectrum, we also attribute the other with all kinds of positive qualities they don’t deserve, so as not to have to fulfil our own potential or be challenged by it. This both divests oneself of the responsibility for personal growth and lends ballast to an otherwise rocky situation by affording the other with more credit than they are due. Thus the unhappy relationship both provides a person with the opportunity to rid themselves of, or at least ignore, feelings of inferiority on the one hand and renounce the gauntlet of unlived potential on the other. The unhappy relationship gives a person the chance to idealise themselves without having to grow, to be powerful or at least hard done by without having to be vulnerable. The shining knight always gets to show up in a full suit of armour.
Projection achieves an added twist when a partner is made responsible for your happiness. It’s no longer simply a question of the shadow being projected but of the anima or animus. Anima/us projections are from a deeper layer of the psyche and comprise issues of meaning, potential and fulfilment. Such projections require the other to live up to something they are ill-equipped to shoulder. When this inevitably falls short there is bound to be both disappointment and the plaintive insistence that the now diminished partner ‘recover’ their capacity to make us feel good about ourselves. This can become an embittered project. Couples can co-exist in such an unhappy tryst for a lifetime. It is however the lesser of two evils. The alternative, which is to be the author of one’s own meaningful destiny, is a much greater challenge, devoid of blaming and ‘if only’.
“A marriage is more likely to succeed if the woman follows her own star and remains conscious of her wholeness than if she constantly concerns herself with her husband’s star and his wholeness. When a woman experiences the mystery of creativeness in herself, in her own inner world, she is doing the right thing and then no longer demands it from the outside — from her husband, her son, or anyone else close to her.” (Jung in conversation with Esther Harding)
Jung was just as unequivocal in his thoughts about men, ‘The fact that a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing … He must obey his own law…The only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization — absolute and unconditional— of its own particular law … To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being … he has failed to realise his own life’s meaning.’
The combined effect of shadow and anima/us projections, whilst initially relieving tension, ultimately make for a very particular kind of psychic poison. Whilst it rids a person of both inferiority and responsibility, the resulting righteousness hardly compensates the misery and listlessness entailed. Individuation, with all its trials and tribulations, is no longer the discomforting and gristly morsel the Fates would have you chew, but so too does everything else then grind to a halt. Out of the blue you are now the victim of circumstance, all for the privilege of a feigned and unfulfilling innocence, which, for all its protective promise, does not sustain or satisfy.
Now let’s apply these dynamics to political leadership in order to try and understand how the unpopular and tyrannical, likewise, manage to stay in place. Like the unhappy romance which persists despite its miseries, so too the betrayed election promises, the gross revelations, the hidden tax returns, the body odour of the reviled leader, all would seem to be enough to end the affair. Yet the tyrant stays in power way longer than you would think possible despite the protestations of the disaffected electorate.
You wonder about the teflon effect, where every valid grievance magically comes to nothing. From Tiberius to Trump we seem to expect the impunity, perversity and corruption of the powerful. The liberty, equality and fraternity of 1789 gave way to Napoleon crowning himself Emperor of France and its colonies within the space of a single generation. Of course we say out loud how much we wish for benevolent leadership just as the cuckold holds out for true love, yet where would we be without some aberrant lord to revile, rehabilitate, indict or condemn?
The reviled leader does not survive despite his miscreants but because of them. A milder sinner would not last half as long. His incoherence, bigotry and pussy grabbing preserve him in a way no amount of statesmanship could afford. It serves us to think of him as an aberration so as not to be reminded of our collective predilection for corrupt leadership, just as the ardent lover thinks of their current misery as an exception to the rule, forgetting the trail of disappointments which preceded it. Whether individually or collectively, there is this defensive need for the appalling other against whom one may yet measure one’s own upstanding forbearance.
The corrupt leader is also kept in place, like the failing lover, by more than the need for a hook to hang the shadow upon. They too are maintained by the projection of hopes and dreams alongside the stabilising effect of exported contempt. One of the features of kingship is that they are appointed by god, all of which alleviates the rest of us from the burden of having to have our own difficult tussle with the divine. We collectively project the Self onto the leader in order not to have to suffer the vicissitudes of spiritual growth. After all, ‘the experience of the Self is always a defeat for the ego’. (Jung 1974)
Part of the process of individuation is that the ego is forced to relinquish its claim to being the centre of everything. It’s a rather unpleasant and disorienting deflation to realise you are not captain of your ship. Its far easier on us to have someone else appointed to do the mediating with the gods on our behalf, especially if it means being able to hold onto the idea that the psyche is what I know of it. So, whilst wannabe kings are scary, immoral and persecutory so too does their divine appointment leave them with the difficult task of having to deal with the gods even if they manifestly fail at the job.
In ancient times a ruler was held responsible if the crops did not grow, because he had clearly failed to propitiate the gods. The ruler was not just a political leader but the mediator between the human world and the divine or cosmic order. If crops failed, floods came, droughts persisted, or epidemics spread, people frequently interpreted this as evidence that the ruler had lost divine favour or failed in ritual duties. The Chinese had a specific name for it, the Mandate of Heaven. Emperors sometimes issued public confessions after crop failures, acknowledging their own moral shortcomings and ordering acts of repentance, whilst the starving peasants were at least comforted, if not by full bellies, then at least by clean conscience.
We collectively tolerate the tyrant’s boot on our neck in the same way the unhappy person goes home to their abusive partner. We can be preoccupied with his ills rather than our own whilst skilfully handing over sovereign responsibility for what happens next at one and the same time. The jesus/tyrant, like the partner in receipt of anima/us projections can be lumbered with the terrifying responsibility of having to intercede/mediate with the gods on our behalf, leaving us free to renounce the dread prospect of having to do the job for ourselves.
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