In the middle of the night, a man in a hospital bed kept falling out of bed.
Each time, the orderlies came and picked him up off the floor. They helped him get back into bed.
And then, a short while later — THUD. The man fell out again. The reason why is pretty incredible.
Today is the last day of my denial mini-series.
Over the past five days, I’ve showed you different ways that people deny unpleasant things in their lives.
I’ve been doing this A) because this denial stuff is fascinating… and B) because it’s something we all do all the time.
So my claim is that if you know how denial shows up in life, it can help you understand yourself better. And it can help you understand other people too, including the ones you want to get something from.
And now we’ve come full circle.
Because today’s final denial mechanism is projection.
I wrote about that recently. An Internet stranger sent me an email to accuse me of name-dropping in this newsletter… and in that same email, he rattled off the names of a bunch of copywriting gurus.
But that’s kind of fluffy, isn’t it?
There’s no way to prove that it’s really denial-by-projection that’s going on in such a person’s brain.
That’s why I’m telling you the story off the man who kept falling out of bed.
This story was reported in the book Phantoms in the Brain by Vilaynur Ramachandran. He’s the neuroscientist who studied people with paralyzed limbs.
Ramachandran found these paralyzed-limb patients sometimes engaged in ridiculous, obvious, impossible denials… in spite of otherwise being perfectly sane and rational people.
Like the guy who kept falling out of bed.
The doctor on the hospital ward asked him why he kept falling out of bed.
The falling man looked frightened. “Doctor,” he said, “these medical students have been putting a cadaver’s arm in my bed. I’ve been trying to get rid of it all night!”
In other words, this guy couldn’t admit the paralyzed arm belonged to him. So he assigned it to a cadaver.
And he kept pushing it away (rightly so, who wants to sleep next to a cadaver’s arm). But each time he finally got the arm out of the bed, he found himself pulled after it down to the floor.
You might say this denial borders between rationalization (my email yesterday) and projection (my email today).
Fine. Ramachandran has more straightforward projection stories.
Like the woman who claimed the paralyzed arm next to her was too big and hairy to be her own.
“Whose arm is it?” Ramachandran asked her.
The woman thought for a second. “It must be my brother’s,” she said.
So that’s all I got for you for denial and projection. Except one more quick story.
It’s by James Altucher, about an encounter he had with one of the most infamous people of this century.
James’s story features projection by that infamous person. And it might save you from making a huge mistake at some point in your life.
So if you’re curious to read the story, you can find it below.
But before you go, you look like the kind of person who wants to get more email subscribers. Am I right? Maybe I’m just projecting. Sign up for my newsletter in any case. And then here’s James’s article:
https://jamesaltucher.com/blog/im-the-worst-judge-of-character/