Fun with projection

The other day I got bored and started bingeing through the archives of The Last Psychiatrist. This used to be a great blog and I've quoted it before; this blog (well, along with dating D) is a large part of what helped me understand what a narcissist is (and then realize that both Wife and Father fit that description too).
 
Part of what is so fun about TLP is that he introduces so many subsidiary topics in the process of making his main points: you can get a full meal just on the appetizers and garnishes. And so in the course of a post about why education has become such a boondoggle, he refers to the psychological concept of projection and then explains what it is. I quote at some length, both because it's relevant to what I'm going to say next and because he is way more entertaining than I am: 

It sounds like you project unwanted feelings onto another person, which is both wrong and impossible. It's not an action, it's a problem of perception. The unwanted feelings don't make sense coming from someone like you, so you conclude they must be coming from the other person.

To use the frequent example of "homophobia": a guy feels gay impulses and can't "handle it" but he doesn't get rid of them by putting them onto someone else, he confuses them as coming from someone else. He smells gayness, "Where is it coming from? Me? Impossible! Jesus washed my feet. Must be that guy." Sorry, wildman, whoever smelt it dealt it. Projection is the most primitive of defenses, circa age 2, and the description should make it clear it is a narcissistic defense: one's perception of the world is inextricably, concretely the result of one's inner states. There is no "objectivity" possible.

The purpose of projection is not to get rid of the feelings, but to explain their presence, to defend the self against a label: "I'm not gay..... even if I have gay sex once in a while." The point isn't to avoid gay sex, the gayness isn't intolerable to them-- e.g. observe the high hat Christians caught in various rest stops across our land-- but even though they've committed the act, it doesn't affect their identity.

 

What I find fascinating about this selection is how perfectly it reflects a conversation I had with Father late one night, several years ago, back when he was still alive. It was late at night and he'd been drinking — well, probably both of us had — and he was complaining about being fat and out of shape. At that point I was exercising regularly, so I asked him why he didn't just go to the local gym and work out, even if he started very slowly?

Father: Well I was going for a little while, but then I really had to stop.

Hosea: Why?

Father: Because it was such a major gay hangout.

Hosea: What do you mean?

Father: Well all the guys there were gay except me, and they used it as a pickup joint.

Hosea: You mean they were actually having sex in the shower?

Father: No, nothing like that, thank God. They weren't doing anything out in public. But you could just tell.

Hosea: Well did they stop you from using the equipment?

Father: No.

Hosea: Then why couldn't you just work out and ignore them? What's it to you what they do when they leave the gym?

Father: [swallowing and speaking with great difficulty] Because if I keep going to the gym while they are there too, they might think I'm one of them.

Hosea: But they are strangers. Who cares what they think?

Father: [in such a small voice it was almost inaudible] They might ask me to join them.

I stopped the conversation there, and changed the subject. Later I kicked myself for quitting then, thinking that there were two other things I ought to have said: first, So if they invite you why not just say No? and second, No offense but they are looking for someone fifty years younger than you are and in a lot better shape, so I think you're safe. But I let the opportunity slip away, and maybe saying those things would have been unkind.

But now I reread that conversation in the light of TLP's remarks above, and it looks obvious to me what he was saying. I assume that in reality it wasn't that the other guys there were flirting with each other; if they had been, that would have made this gym very different from any other I've ever been to. What makes far more sense is the idea that it was Father who was attracted by all the naked bodies there, who was appalled at his own attraction, and who quit going because he couldn't deal with the psychic stress.

To be clear, Father never said anything overt about being attracted by other men. Quite the reverse. On the surface he sounded very hostile to homosexuality, even as he also said, "I'm not homophobic. Don't be ridiculous! I'm an actor — some of my best friends are gay. It's just that ...." But he brought up the subject at the damnedest times, in ways that could sound obsessive. He spent years before Brother and I were safely paired off with women (Wife for me, and any of Brother's girlfriends for him) warning us about the risks of deciding to be gay. He had this theory that he repeated — again, at the damnedest times — that some guys decide they are gay when they really aren't, just because of a "formative early experience." The key to this theory, for him, was that these guys shouldn't let themselves get confused by their "early experience" or "youthful experimentation" because the risk is that they prematurely assume they must be gay and therefore never take the time to discover that in reality they are straight.

Of course this theory is crazy. I've never known anyone it describes ... unless of course it actually described Father himself. Unless it was autobiographical. Unless he himself felt a powerful attraction to other men — possibly reinforced by "youthful experimentation" of his own — and it scared the shit out of him. So that all his hostility was a wall he built up ... partly to keep himself from acting on his attractions and partly to keep anyone else from guessing.

He was way too smart for these beliefs to have been simple stupidity. This theory makes much more sense.

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