Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.
Matthew 7:5
I am of course projecting1 when I claim this verse is about projection, but let’s run with the idea and see if there’s anything to it.
“You’re projecting” or “projection” are common snipes on the internet nowadays, partially due to the spread of psychological lingo from increased therapy consumption, partially because the term gives voice to a felt but previously mute affect salient to modern experience.
The less sophisticated precursor is “I know you are but what am I”, which acknowledges the noun under question is an insult and reflects it back at the insulter. No more thought is involved in this rebuttal than most usages of “projection”; it is almost always launched out of pure reflexive defense, but sometimes inadvertently grazes truth. After all it “takes one to know one” and “game recognize game”.
To project, though, is more precisely to impute qualities onto the object of transference that properly belong to oneself. If I say Matthew 7:5 is about projection, that says nothing about the verse but much about what I see in the verse and perhaps about the type of guy I am to see the verse this way (or this way before others). But the verse is not about memory foam mattresses, and so we can say that projections can be more or less sharp in the same way changing the focus on a projector allows for a sharper image2. Thusly, empathy and by extension empaths are real.
Matthew 7:5 adds color to the injunctions against judging in the previous lines, seemingly suggesting that it does not merely take one to know one, but that it takes an extreme saturation, often subconscious, of some property in one before he can start noticing it in others, which strikes me as closer to the psychological truth. Then, before he can attempt to help without instead exacerbating the problem, he has to integrate that property within himself to the point where it no longer triggers when he sees it outside himself. “Put on your oxygen mask first” is a purely secular instruction, justified by actuarial tables, of expressing the same idea; and like so you can see the fractal nature of hermeneutics (reality more broadly if you prefer).
Conceiving “beam” as a large wooden log defies physicality completely differently than does changing water into wine- I find it actually harder to believe- but now I think this metaphor and its ideation are minor miracles in themselves, far from absurd or uninspired. The eureka which prompted this post was imagining it as a beam of light, as from a projector.
Because it’s not about any one thing per se; multiple readings on multiple levels are available and so long as they strike at the general cluster of associations you have with the text, you can extract meaning from them
There is always a resolution of sharpest focus for AV projectors for a given optical distance etc, but not necessarily so for psychologies or exegeses, and this is where the metaphor breaks. But metaphors are designed to relate, not equate