Projection is the whole mechanism of this opposition. The native meets a person, furnishes them with qualities from private stock, and then relates to the furnishing. For a time this is delightful for both parties, since the other person is being seen at their very best and can feel it. The reckoning arrives when the real one asserts itself, usually over something small and domestic, and the native experiences it as betrayal rather than as information. The cycle can run three or four times before the pattern is credited.
Concretely, the trouble sits in what is not said. Financial arrangements between the couple are left informal and turn out to be worse than either believed. Someone is drinking, or spending, or seeing another person, and the native half knew for a year. Rescues are attempted: the debts of a partner assumed, a career sacrificed to support somebody else's, a house sold to fund a plan that was never realistic. The native's own artistic ambition is frequently the thing donated, and it is not usually reclaimed.
Holding both ends means keeping the capacity for devotion and putting the arithmetic on paper. Natives who reach this are formidable in any work that requires seeing a person's possibility while dealing with their actual conduct: teaching, therapy, agenting, direction. Those who do not simply change the object of the projection, and the new one behaves exactly as the last did. Disillusion is not the cure and cynicism is not maturity. What is asked for is the harder thing, which is looking and staying.
What It Gives
- ◆sees possibility in other people
- ◆devotion that outlasts convenience
- ◆artistic feeling drawn from others
- ◆compassion for those who disappoint
What It Costs
- ◆partners built from private imagination
- ◆informal money arrangements that unravel
- ◆own ambition donated to a rescue
This is one line of a whole chart. The rest of it — every placement, house and aspect at once — is a birth date away.
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