Two common cognitive biases, negative transference and psychological projection, are evident in most people but especially common in those of the leftoid persuasion. There are also racial differences in vulnerability to each of these ego-assuaging biases, manifesting typically in lower performing and worse-behaving groups who use these coping mechanisms to alleviate or accommodate their feelings of resentment and envy.
Negative transference is a subset of psychological projection. A quick definition:
Transference is having feelings that seem to be about one person when they’re really about someone else. For example, I sometimes think my therapist doesn’t want to listen to me. Really it was my mother who didn’t listen, and I’ve transferred those feelings onto my therapist.
Projection is where you think someone else is feeling or behaving in a particular way when actually they’re your feelings or behaviour. I find it hard to feel sad or angry about things I tell my therapist, but I imagine him feeling sad or angry – I project my feelings onto him. And sometimes people accuse others of doing things they are in fact doing themselves.
So transference is about the cause of the feelings, and projection is about who you think is feeling them. Does that help? So your therapist would tell by looking at a) the cause of the feelings and b) where you think they’re coming from.
If you experience your therapist as being distant when really a parent was distant, that’s transference.
If you experience your therapist as being distant when really you’re being distant, that’s projection.
Negative transference is similar to scapegoating and blame shifting. Basically, person [A] transfers negative feelings he has for person or group [A2] to an innocent third party [B] when person [A] has an affinity for or emotional connection to person or group [A2] and balks at blaming [A2] for his bad feelings.
Psychological projection is when person [A] accuses innocent person or group [B] of poor behavior that person [A] is doing himself, or which person [A]’s associated group [A2] is doing. Projection is also a form of blame shifting.
These two powerful cognitive biases are ego emollients because they shift blame away from a person, or away from a group with whom the person positively identifies, to a resented third party person or group.
Which brings me to this observation:
Just like “White racism” is negative transference by blacks who can’t admit it’s black dysfunction and criminal violence that bedevils them, “the patriarchy” is negative transference by women who can’t admit it’s female cattiness, gossip, innuendo, emotional manipulation, and envy of other women’s beauty that bedevils them.
In both cases, blacks and women (particularly feminists) also psychologically project their own bad behavior onto resented outgroups (Whites and men, respectively). So they are covering for themselves as well as for the groups to which they belong.
Negative transference and psychological projection explain A LOT of the current hysterics we see from the BLM crowd, the pussyhat bluehairs, and the…..well, you know who.
[crypto-donation-box]
