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The relation between the interior and the exterior is a primary pivot in the formation of the subject. In 1895 Freud wrote to Fliess, “Whenever an internal change occurs, we have the choice of assuming either an internal or an external cause. If something deters us from the internal derivation, we naturally seize upon the external one.” (Freud, 1985, p. 109)
This is the mechanism known as projection, and while it functions as a defense it also provides us, as defenses generally do, with the texts for reading our desire. Defense is the screen on which the shadow of our desires plays out. That is, if we are willing to read them as such. Freud suggests we have a choice. The projected truths are those no longer hidden inside, but in their projection hidden in plain sight, out there for us to see. It takes a certain opening of the eyes.
The barrier of primary repression, a formative mechanism for psychic being, always deters us in some measure from assuming the pure internal derivation of an event, and thus no one's desire is ever wholly transparent to the self. Projection onto the exterior becomes another way to see within. The world is therefore the screen that shows us what takes place in the theater of our unconscious.
The history of psychoanalytic schools and many of the debates between them can be written on the problematic of interior and exterior: from the first debates about the primacy of an observing ego to current concerns about the locus of the relational matrix. The dream of once and for all settling this dialectic by the privileged status of the interior or the exterior, or even of getting them each to stand still long enough so we know which side we're on, has been repeatedly betrayed by the truth that it is the mechanism itself-the projection per se-that is in fact the primary point. There is no locatable interior that stands