Psychoanalytic theory emphasizes the projecting person’s repudiation of his own feelings. The process is described as one wherein a person injects into another the disowned aspects of his own personality. When my father took a strap to me he beat into me his unacknowledged misery. My father hated and punished his own weak, dependent child in me, and I absorbed into my psyche both the hated and the hate-filled parts of him. I took on his sadness, depression, and rage.
