Freud proposed that from early infancy on, whenever we mentally attend or tentatively classify, whenever we orient or organize, whenever we anticipate or understand, we project. We always regard a puzzling predicament as similar to a past and familiar situation, or we think about our own mental activities as shared with, and complementary to, those of another person. Thus, unconsciously, we regress and can think diffusely by using a developmentally surmounted mode of thought. Simultaneously and sequentially, we sort past from

present and one immediate relationship from another. This is Freud's psychoanalytic concept of projection. At times he has been misunderstood.