Page 9 - My Indigo Sun September-October 2025
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When the Other Is You:
Love Beyond Projection
Why is it that our most passionate Jung understood how necessary this process is:
relationships so often dazzle and devastate at “This process of coming to terms with the
the same time? We “fall in love,” convinced ‘Other’ in us is well worth while, because in this
we’ve found our other half, only to discover way we get to know aspects of our nature which
later that what we adored has become what we would not allow anybody else to show us
we resent the most. At the heart of this and which we ourselves would never have
paradox lies projection. Carl Jung wrote in The admitted. Only in this painful way is it possible
Red Book: to gain a positive insight into the complex
nature of one’s own personality.”
“Two things are yet to be discovered: the first — Carl Jung, CW14: Mysterium Coniunctionis,
is the infinite gulf that separates us from one par 706
another; the second is the bridge that could
connect us.” The Slippery Nature of Projection
Projections are tricky. They feel external, but
My new book, WHEN the OTHER Is YOU, Love they originate within. The more intensely we
Beyond Projection explores both that gulf and that idealize or vilify someone, the more likely we
bridge. Relationships often begin in the fire of are caught in the web of projection. Often we
projection — we see in the Other what we have not cannot see or accept our own shadow until we
yet owned within ourselves. True love, however, actively dislike it in someone else. That moment
cannot emerge until after projections are of irritation, judgment, or even outright
withdrawn. To move beyond illusion is not the loss aversion is a clue that a part of our psyche is
of love; it is the deepening of it. This is the alchemy being externalized.
of relationship: unconscious contents transformed
into consciousness. The person before us carries an
aspect of our own soul — the part that longs, more
than anything, to come home.
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