Shadow
“Surely you knew that everybody’s got a little larceny operating in them.”  ― Bing Crosby, ‘White Christmas'

When people attempt to deny the tendencies of anger, assertiveness, erotic impulses, joy, hostility, courage, aggression, drive, interest and so on, they will discover that they do not vanish. Pretending that the tendencies belong to someone else and denying ownership of them people come to believe those tendencies they are not-self, alien and outside. These alienated tendencies are thus projected as the shadow. To restore the individual's impoverished self-image he or she must confront one's persona and its own shadow - difficult to do since it is a threat to one's illusions.

Psychological projection is a defense mechanism in which the ego defends itself against unconscious impulses or tendencies by denying their existence in themselves and attributing them to others. For example, a bully may project their own feelings of vulnerability onto the target, or a person who is confused will project their own feelings of confusion and inadequacy onto other people.

In regard to the tendency of drive, for example, the wise individual when pressured from outside sources (boss, spouse, school, friends, children, etc.) learns to use the feelings of pressure as a signal that he has some energy and drive that he is unaware of.  The individual learns to translate "I feel pressured" into "I have more drive than I know". In the end he or she realizes that they are acting on their own drive. An impulse (drive, anger, desire), which is aimed at the environment, when projected, appears as an impulse originated in the environment and aimed back at the individual who ends up getting wacked with their own energy. The energy attacks one from the outside, instead of helping you attack the environment.

Ken Wilber’s discussion on Shadow (‘No Boundry’):
All of us have a dark or negative side. But 'dark side' does not necessarily mean 'bad side', but that we all have a little black heart within us, like the old saying "there's a little bit of larceny in everybody's heart".  If we are accepting of it can add to the 'spice of life'.

The witch hunter believes that she has no little black heart.  She assumes to some degree a peculiar air of righteousness.  It isn't that she lacks a little black heart, as she would like to believe and like to have you believe, but that she is extremely uncomfortable with her little black heart. She resists it in herself, tries to deny it, attempts to cast it out. But it remains, as it must, and it remains there, persistently clamoring for some attention. The more her little black heart clamors for attention, the more she resists it. The more she resists it, the more strength it acquires, and the more it demands her awareness. Finally, because she can't deny it any longer, she starts to see it.  But she sees it in the only way she can - as residing other people.  She knows somebody has a little black heart, but since it just can't be her, it must be someone else.  All she has to do is to find this somebody else, and this becomes an extremely important task, because if she can't find someone onto whom she can project here shadow, she will be left holding it herself. It is here that we see the resistance playing its crucial role.  For just as the person once hated and resisted her own shadow with unbridled passion, and sought to eradicate it by any means, she now despises, with the very same passion, those onto who she casts her own shadow.

Sometime the witch hunting takes on atrocious dimensions - the Nazi persecutions of Jews, the Salem Witch trials, the Ku Klux Klan scapegoating of blacks. The persecutor hates the persecuted for precisely those traits that the persecutor displays with a glaringly uncivilized fury.  The upshot is that the individual is desperate to prove that their own shadows belong to other people. Another example is people launching into tirades about how disgusting homosexuals are and in an emotional outrage advocate suspending gay civil rights. The person doesn't hate the homosexual because he is homosexual, he hates him because he sees in the homosexual what he secretly fears he himself might become. He is uncomfortable with his own natural, unavoidable, but minor homosexual inclinations in other people - but only because he first hates them in himself. An old proverb has it:

I looked and looked and this I came to see,
That what I thought was you and you,
Was really me and me.

One of the most common complaints of people seeking emotional counseling is that they feel rejected. They feel that nobody really likes them, that nobody cares for them, or than everybody is highly critical of them. Often, they will feel this is unfair because basically they like everybody. They feel that they pretty much lack any rejecting tendencies themselves.  They bend over backwards to be friendly and uncritical of others. But these are exactly the two distinguishing marks of projection: you lack the trait, everybody else has lots of it.  But, as every child knows, "It takes one to know one." The person who feels everybody is rejecting him is really one who it totally unaware of his own tendencies to reject and criticize others. The point, true of all projections, is that some people may indeed be very critical of you. But this won't overwhelm you unless you add to their real criticism of your own project criticism.  Thus, any time you feel intense feelings of inferiority and rejection, it would be wise to look first for a projection and admit that you can be a little bit more critical of the world than you know.

The key to therapy is translation:

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