When Algorithms Feed the Unconscious: Projection in the Digital Age

Projection is not simply a clinical concept. In depth psychology, it is one of the psyche’s first ways of knowing, a primitive bridge between inner life and outer reality. We meet the world through what we place upon it, and then, if we are fortunate, we slowly learn to take back what we have attributed elsewhere.

Projection as the Psyche’s First Lens

In psychoanalytic language, projection describes the mind’s capacity to disown aspects of itself and locate them in others. Freud described its defensive function. Later clinicians, including Harry Stack Sullivan, observed how, in more extreme states, the environment itself can become saturated with projected meaning. In ordinary life, projection shapes love, conflict, status, politics, and belonging. It is one of the ways we recognise ourselves, and one of the ways we avoid ourselves.

Depth psychotherapy often begins here: not by arguing with what a person “sees,” but by asking what the psyche is trying to know, protect, or reveal through what it perceives. Read more about it here.

The Algorithmic Echo Chamber

Social media platforms thrive by predicting attention. In practice, this means they become extraordinarily skilled at tracking preference, fear, outrage, desire, and identification, and then feeding these back to the user as if they were “the world”. The result is an engineered echo chamber that I call the echo-sphere, where projection is rarely interrupted by reality but constantly reinforced by repetition.

Jung warned, “The more projections are thrust in between the subject and the environment, the harder it is for the ego to see through its illusions”. When an environment is designed to return our biases to us, the psyche does not collide with difference; it collides with itself. Over time, this erodes discernment, narrows imagination, and amplifies certainty without understanding.

For high-functioning, high-responsibility individuals, this is not a minor cultural issue. It affects judgment, intimacy, leadership, and inner freedom. If your attention is subtly shaped, your life is shaped. Depth work, in this context, becomes an act of reclaiming: withdrawing projection, restoring complexity, and rebuilding the capacity to think independently.

If you’d like to read a more in-depth version of this reflection, you can find it on my Substack.