So I’m fairly social for someone like me and have done my fair share of talking to people as well as toward people, some talks being more passionate than others, so I guess having my odds of this reduced is a factor here when I say occasionally “projecting” will be brought up during a conversation. One should “stop projecting” they might say. It’s always in an accusatory kind of context, with being described a certain way by someone else often being connected to the latter person fitting what they’re thinking of.
Is this… a meme for a lack of a better word? Where does this conceivably come from? Seeing such a thing all the time, I can’t fathom the mindset, it seems so faulty my mind groups it in with grievance misapplication. Why would someone play hot potato with things even deemed to be things nobody should be handling like it’s second nature? How could someone in control subconsciously see instinct in this? What happened the last time this came up for you, when did it turn out to be the case?
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It’s not a meme, it’s a psychological concept. It boils down to when you attribute a motive or a mindset to someone when in fact you’re only speculating based on that of your own. So if you assert that someone let’s say is doing something because they’re afraid of xyz - and in fact there could be many reasons and there’s no real evidence of what you’re claiming, but if your peers know that that is a characteristic of yours, they might accuse you of projecting.
Projecting, to me anyways, is when someone is forcing a narrative for the sake of an argument. It’s like an advanced stage of making strawmen. But now it’s all forced so they’re just forcing it on you.
I think there’s an added element of “some aspect of the strawman you’re projecting on to others is actually something you think about yourself”
Projection is the thing some people do where they accuse someone else of something they themselves do, especially when there is no reason to suspect the accused. It could be considered a form of self-report.
An example might be if a racist individual (lets call them Bob) accuses someone of racism (Joe) because they crossed a street. Joe may have had plenty of valid reasons to cross the street; maybe they wanted to go into the shop across the street, maybe their car was parked on the other side, maybe they saw a friend and wanted to surprise them. Bob, however, being a racist fuck, sees Joe cross the street, sees a black man walking down the sidewalk that Joe just left, and immediately jumps to the conclusion that Joe was crossing the street to avoid the black dude. The reality is that Joe didn’t even notice the black guy, but Bob, being a racist fuck, assumes that Joe is just doing the same thing that Bob would have done.
That is projection.
I’m not sure if that fully answers your question, though I will say I see people seemingly jump the gun a lot. Accusing someone of projecting is similar to accusing someone of arguing in bad faith; except instead of accusing them of arguing in bad faith, you’re accusing them of making accusations “in bad faith”, so to speak. However, like accusing someone of arguing in bad faith, some people will just use it to shut people down.
It’s not always negative. If you’re a compassionate person, you may conclude someone else’s actions are motivated by compassion (like yours are) even when you have no way to know the motivation.
In this context “projecting” is a fancy “no u”, used to imply that you’re claiming that someone has an attribute not because the person has it, but because you do.
It isn’t quite a meme, just one of those “catch-all” idiotic defences. Typically given by people who care more about appearances than the validity of a claim (i.e. stupid thus harmful people).
EDIT: it’s relevant to note that I’m being fairly specific when I say “this context”, the context specified by the OP in the first paragraph: people discussing, and one claims/implies that another is projecting in an accusatory way. I am not criticising the actual psychological concept that this pseudo-psychological crap comes from. Is this clear?
You don’t know the context, because OP didn’t provide any details of what was being discussed. It’s entirely possible that it was a valid call in some or all of those situations.
Why is it seen so often in discussions of psychology, which make it out like it’s that kind of phenomenon?
It is an actual phenomenon in psychology, where you assign a set of your attributes that you consider undesirable to another person. It works like a defence mechanism to stabilise the psyche. It is not that commonly discussed though - except perhaps in psychoanalysis.
And that’s exactly why those “keyboard psychologists” (who are neither psychologists, nor informed laymen) repurposed the term into the “no u!” defence that I mentioned. It’s simply too good of an excuse when someone criticises them, an easy way to turn the criticism against the critic.
