PROJECTING YOUR GOD, HOLDING THAT DIVINITY WITHIN, LOVING AND WALKING PARALLEL PATHS

Marion Woodman, Conscious Femininity: Interviews with Marion Woodman (Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts) (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1993) (Peay: What is a projection? Woodman: It's like an arrow. It's a bundle of psychic energy that sees something out there that it's attracted to and the arrow automatically fired--bang!--and if the other person has an arrow coming at you, that is called falling in love. And it's a straight neurosis. But it is part of psychic growth. As times goes on, you begin to realize that all these men, or women, you are so fatally attracted to are all very much alike at their core. You're really falling in love with your own projection each time. Gradually it gets through to you that it's not the other person you're in love with, but part of your own self that you're projecting into that person. It's those projected parts of ourselves that we have to pull back. A lot of women project their mother onto a man. It's all a bag of confusion! Peay: What do you mean by having to 'pull back' projections? Woodman: That is the most painful, agonizing process in the world. Because you have to recognize that what you thought was out there in another person is not out there, but inside yourself. Most people experience pulling back a projection as isolation, as being cut off from the outer world. But if you have loved a man and you have projected your inner god onto him, you have to recognize that he isn't a god after all. The real god is inside. You have to recognize the illusions, the delusions and the pain of human limitations. Then gradually it dawns on you what a huge mistake you've made." Peay: What happens then? Woodman: When you're able to recognize that it's your god you've been projecting, or, in a man's case, the goddess, you learn to hold that divinity within. Then you're able to ask yourself, 'Do I love that human being?' And you may find out that you do. That this man is sharing the journey with you, and he's put up with (dare I say) all your shit (that's how dreams image it), and you've put up with his, and there the two of you are, walking through life, together. There's something noble in his suffering. There's something noble in your own suffering. You're not leaning on each other. You're walking parallel paths, you're not holding each other up. That's a marvelous thing, to love another human being like that." Id. at 122-123.).