Ghosts as Phenomenal Projections

From Externalised Complexes to the Construction of Lived Reality

In an earlier article, Ghosts as Externalised Projections, I explored Carl Jung’s suggestion that some apparitions might be understood psychologically as the exteriorised effects of autonomous unconscious complexes. I combined that proposal with parts-working approaches, dissociation, schema theory and the developing idea of a Human Symbolic Interface.

The central question was relatively straightforward:

Could something experienced internally as a psychological part become represented externally as a person, ghost, creature or symbolic object?

That remains an important question.

However, my developing theoretical model now suggests that the question may have been framed one level too late.

It assumed that we first perceive an external world and then somehow project something onto it.

What if perception does not work that way?
What if the world we consciously experience is already the result of a constructive process?

If so, an externalised projection need not be imagined as a psychological picture subsequently pasted over an otherwise complete perception of reality.

It could instead be one contribution to the construction of the phenomenal world itself.

That distinction considerably changes how we might understand Jungian projection, hallucination, shadow, collective projection and individuation.

Jung’s exteriorisation reconsidered

Jung’s 1919 paper, later published as The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirits, approached many spirit experiences through the psychology of autonomous complexes. The earlier article followed Jung’s proposal that some apparently external beings could represent unconscious psychological contents appearing with a degree of independence from conscious control. Jung later became less certain that an exclusively psychological explanation could account for every phenomenon he had encountered, but the psychological possibility itself remained important.

The usual interpretation of projection is relatively simple. – something that belongs psychologically to me, but I do not recognise it as mine , I therefore encounter it as though it belongs somewhere else.

For example:

I cannot recognise my own aggression, therefore I repeatedly experience another person as unusually aggressive.

This is useful, but it leaves an unanswered question.

What does “experience another person as aggressive” actually mean?

Does the eye first deliver a neutral person and the mind afterwards attach a conceptual label:

aggressive?

Or has the psychological expectation already influenced:

what I notice;
what I ignore;
what movements become salient;
what facial expression I perceive;
what intentions I infer;
what memories are activated;
and what emotional response accompanies the entire encounter?

Modern perception research strongly supports this second possibility, that perception is not simply a passive recording of sensory input.

Expectations can alter perceptual processing before or during sensory interpretation. Experimental work has shown that prior expectations can generate sensory templates before a stimulus appears, which can bias sensory representations, and influence what people subsequently report perceiving.

The implication is important: Projection need not occur after perception , and projection can potentially participate in perception.

The phenomenal field

Carl Rogers provides useful language for this problem.

In Client-Centred Therapy, Rogers described the self as something perceived within a wider phenomenal field: the person’s lived field of perceptions, meanings, relationships, values and experience. He described self-concept as an organised configuration of perceptions that have become admissible to awareness.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty approached the same territory philosophically

For Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenal field is not merely a private picture inside the skull. It is the lived world as encountered through an embodied perceiver. He argued that the objective world is known through phenomena rather than encountered independently of them, while also insisting that reflection never completely escapes its own situated position.

This is crucial, there may be an external world independent of us, but that is not the same thing as saying we experience the external world without mediation.

The reality directly available to us is:

The world as it appears within our phenomenal field.

The tree I experience is not merely wavelengths striking a retina, it is:

tree;
distance;
shade;
climbable;
beautiful;
dangerous;
familiar;
the tree where somebody once hurt me;
the tree where I proposed marriage;
the tree containing a face in its bark.

Some of those meanings may be obvious, others may operate before conscious explanation.

Our phenomenal world is therefore already organised around relevance.

From one phenomenal field to many

Until recently, our developing theory followed Rogers in speaking about the phenomenal field of the individual. That was useful but, but theoretically incomplete.

If we look at this issue through the eye of psychological multiplicity, we can see that the human organism contains many specialised domains.

A broad domain such as the “Lookout Part”, may itself contain more particular systems concerned with:

body movement;
facial expression;
tone;
words;
memory;
attachment;
boundary violation;
and previously learned coping responses.

If those systems attend to different information and organise that information according to different needs, histories and jurisdictions, then it follows that they may not all construct precisely the same experienced world.

This leads to a new proposal:

The human phenomenal field may itself be polyphenomenal.

Each sufficiently differentiated organismic domain may possess a local phenomenal field: the meaningful world available from its particular position.

The body-language observer sees one world.
The verbal analyst sees another.
The frightened child sees another.
The musician hears another.
The sexual system notices another.
The attachment system inhabits another.

The conscious person ordinarily experiences some combined result and assumes:

This is simply reality.

That assumption may be one of the earliest things individuation eventually has to challenge.

Every field reveals something and conceals something

The developing Anima Polycosmi model already proposes that no local domain possesses universal knowledge.

One domain may be exceptionally competent within its jurisdiction while remaining almost blind to information obvious to another. Its dignity does not make it infallible. Every world reveals something while concealing something else.

That principle becomes even more important when applied phenomenologically.

Imagine meeting somebody who says:

“Everything’s fine.”

The word-checking domain sees:

Clear reassurance.

The facial reader sees:

A forced smile.

The body language reader sees:

Shoulders pulled inward.

The attachment system remembers:

the last time somebody said those words immediately before leaving.

The hopeful part sees:

Reconciliation.

The frightened part sees:

Abandonment.

Which is reality?

The question may initially be wrong, each domain may be accurately reporting its phenomenal field. But the larger organism needs enough differentiation to ask:

What are you seeing?

rather than prematurely demanding:

Which one of you is right?

This is one reason internal plurality can increase knowledge rather than decrease it. Differentiation and discernment require sufficient drilldown to truly understand the ask.

Projection as phenomenal construction

We can now offer a stronger account of Jungian projection, projection is not necessarily:

Internal content > false judgement about external object.

It may sometimes be:

internal domain > altered salience and pattern matching > symbolic interpretation > constructed phenomenal object.

Suppose an old protective domain has learned:

Strangers who resemble this person are dangerous.

It may:

Increase attention to ambiguous threat cues.
Weight some memories more heavily than others.
Interpret a neutral expression pessimistically.
Anticipate hostile movement.

The conscious person then genuinely experiences:

A threatening person.

Laboratory research provides several partial analogues.

Expectation has been shown to influence early face perception, including neural responses to identical visual input.
Social stereotypes can alter the visual representations people form of faces, with evidence that social-conceptual knowledge biases face-related neural representations.
Long-term prior expectations can influence which interpretation dominates when visual input is ambiguous.

None of these experiments demonstrates a Jungian autonomous complex creating a ghost, but they establish the more basic principle requires:

What we already know, expect or fear can participate in constructing what we subsequently experience as perceptual reality.

From ordinary projection to apparition

If psychological contribution to perception exists on a continuum, then ordinary projection and vivid apparition need not necessarily belong to completely unrelated categories, at one end:

“I think that man looks unfriendly.”

Further along:

“His face seems frightening.”

Further:

“I can almost see something monstrous in him.”

Further still:

“I see a monster standing there.”

Mental imagery and visual perception recruit overlapping processes, and experiments show that sufficiently congruent imagery can sometimes be confused with externally driven perception.

Pajani and colleagues found that spontaneous activity patterns in the primary visual cortex could bias subsequent perception towards hallucination-like reports under ambiguous conditions.

Powers and colleagues went further. Using conditioning, they experimentally induced perception-like experiences of expected tones in the absence of the tones themselves. Participants prone to voice-hearing were particularly influenced by learned perceptual expectations.

This establishes further support for what Jung could was speculating about:

Internally generated expectation can contribute enough perceptual information for something absent from the external stimulus to be experienced as perceptually present.

The boundary between image and perception is therefore not infinitely rigid.

The Human Symbolic Interface

This is where the Human Symbolic Interface becomes especially useful: This theory proposes that much organismic information cannot conveniently be exchanged as explicit language.

The organism therefore communicates through:

patterns;
sensations;
images;
emotions;
intuitions;
dreams;
symbols;
and personified forms.

A symbolic representation can compress a much larger field of associations into one manageable experience.

A monster might simultaneously represent:

danger;
an aggressor;
a childhood memory;
powerlessness;
a defensive response;
a forbidden emotion;
and a particular bodily state.

The conscious person, therefore, does not need to receive a report containing ten thousand variables.

They encounter:

The monster.

The earlier Ghosts as Externalised Projections article already proposed that symbolic forms could provide the medium through which dissociated psychological material becomes externally represented. The phenomenal-field approach now makes that proposal more precise.

The symbol need not be added to perception at the end.

It may be the form in which a particular domain contributes its interpretation to the phenomenal field.

A ghost may therefore be a world, not merely an image

Consider the difference, suppose an overlay model says:

I see the room correctly, then my mind adds a ghost.

A phenomenal-construction model says:

My visual, memorial, emotional, symbolic and relational systems collectively construct the room-with-ghost as my experienced world.

That helps explain why a powerful apparition can feel so completely real.

It belongs to the phenomenal field in exactly the same broad sense that the table, wall and doorway belong there.

The experience may include:

spatial location;
depth;
movement;
voice;
emotional relationship;
apparent agency;
and sometimes tactile qualities.

From inside that phenomenal field, the ghost is not experienced as:

“an internally generated symbolic representation.”

It is experienced as:

“there.”

That is not evidence about the ghost’s ultimate ontology, it is evidence about the structure of the experience.

My earlier flowers, reconsidered

In the earlier article I described an experience involving many dark, animated flowers which I later came to understand as symbolically related to dissociative events from childhood.

The older interpretation was:

dissociated material generated symbolic hallucinations.

The newer interpretation asks a more precise question is now informed by the DNA self theory that those flowers might have included genetic source parts, yet to be explored. That explains why they lacked colour, and all looked pretty much the same. Even though each were in a unique physical orientation.

Which parts of my organism were participating in the phenomenal construction through which those flowers became experience?

The flowers were not simply pictures, within my experience they possessed:

identity;
location;
voice;
relationship;
symbolic meaning.

If the newer model is useful, the deeper work is not merely:

“What does the flower symbolise?”

It becomes:

“Who sees the flower?”

“Which domain supplied its form?”

“are those flowers from the same domain, can I differentiate them further?”

“Which domain supplied its emotional tone?”

“Which memory makes this colour significant?”

“Which part knows why this one is different from the others?”

That is a more differentiated approach through which the symbol ceases to be a puzzle for the ego to decode. It becomes a meeting place among phenomenal fields. A starting point for further self-exploration. No longer something entirely unknown.

The ghost as representative

This also connects with the developing Anima Polycosmi distinction between an underlying source-domain and a locally individuated representative.

A symbolic person is not necessarily identical with the complete psychological function it represents. It therefore follows, that a ghost may be a locally generated representative through which a larger domain becomes relationally accessible.

The representative has a particular:

face;
voice;
history;
manner;
symbolic vocabulary;
and jurisdiction.

As relationship deepens, the figure may individuate further, the apparent ghost may eventually reveal itself as:

a frightened child;
a protector;
a memory custodian;
a family-derived schema;
or several previously compressed functions.

The movement is therefore:

apparition > relationship > differentiation > provenance.

That is very different from:

apparition > suppression.

Phenomenal provenance

The concept of provenance now becomes central, when I experience internally:

“That person is evil,”

I have received a conclusion without knowing its source.

Individuation therefore asks:

Who is seeing evil?

Perhaps a frightened eight-year-old domain answers.

Then:

What did you notice?

Perhaps:

His eyes.

Then another domain says:

His eyes aren’t actually angry. They resemble somebody else’s.

Now the phenomenal field can begin to differentiate, and the important developmental movement is from:

reality

towards:

a contribution to reality from a particular source.

That does not make the contribution false, it makes it locatable, and information whose provenance is known can be investigated much more intelligently.

Shadow as a restricted phenomenal field

This also gives us a different account of shadow, the shadow does not need to be imagined as a dark container holding forbidden things. A shadowed domain can instead be understood as:

A constituent of the organism whose phenomenal contribution remains active but whose provenance is no longer accessible to recognised selfhood.

It still sees, predicts, reacts, and it may still alter attention, but the conscious system no longer knows:

whose world this is.

The result may be:

“Everyone hates me.”

or:

“Something terrible is coming.”

or:

“There is somebody in the room.”

The experience arrives already formed, individuation does not necessarily make it disappear. But it increasingly makes it possible to ask:

Who is contributing this world?

Phenomenal individuation

We can therefore define another aspect of individuation:

Phenomenal individuation is the progressive differentiation of the locally constructed fields that contribute to a person’s lived reality.

At first the person experiences one apparently singular world.

Later they discover:

this is my mother’s expectation;

this is my culture’s judgement;

this is my frightened child’s field;

this is my Lookout;

this is my body-language reader;

this is a theological interpretation I inherited;

this is what I actually see when those layers are distinguished.

This does not produce one purified “objective” field, that would simply install the ego as another false sovereign. It produces a more differentiated ecology of perspectives.

Differentiating the personal from the collective

This connects strongly with Jung’s original meaning of individuation. Jung repeatedly distinguished individuation from simply becoming eccentric or individualistic, that the process required differentiation from collective assumptions without abandoning relationship to society.

The phenomenal-field approach suggests why this is so difficult, collective assumptions are rarely experienced merely as propositions, they become part of:

language;
attention;
emotion;
social expectation;
acceptable interpretation;
and perception.

A child repeatedly told:

“People like us don’t do that”

may eventually experience the forbidden possibility as inherently wrong. And a culture repeatedly presenting one group as threatening can change what its members attend to when they encounter individuals belonging to that category.

In fact they may have created an instant “reflexive response”, to mistrust and reject them – even though outwardly they present a mask of genuine acceptance, every question may be specifically targeted to confirm that original, hidden cognitive-bias.

And within this discussion in relation to the phenomenal field, we can now suggest this is part of the process of constructing that personal phenomenal field, and that these work together to enforce such things as self-fulfilling prophecy’s, were beliefs can create a delusional overlay, constantly reinforcing itself, by painting that picture of a so called objective reality, in ones own image.

These ideas expand on the contents of Jung’s Personal Shadow, and show that this may be part of the mechanism of how that aspect of shadow can come to be.

Research on stereotypes provides direct evidence that socially acquired expectations can influence visual representations rather than remaining purely verbal beliefs.

Therefore, differentiating oneself from the collective cannot mean merely deciding:

“I disagree with society.”

One may need to discover how society has become incorporated into what seems obvious, and that is a much deeper form of individuation.

Projection can become collective

There is another important consequence: A projection does not necessarily remain inside the person who generates it. Let us suppose that one person experiences another as threatening.

Their body changes.
Their voice changes.
They withdraw.

They tell a friend:

“There is something strange about him.”

The friend becomes vigilant, and their previously insignificant behaviour now attracts attention. Any ambiguous expression becomes evidence.

The friend tells somebody else, and a social phenomenal field begins forming. This does not require telepathy, it can proceed through:

attention;
language;
body posture;
emotion;
story;
expectation;
group conformity;
and selective reinforcement.

Research shows that social influence can alter people’s private judgements, including in children. In one study, six-year-olds changed their privately expressed opinions after exposure to peer judgements, and the effect could persist beyond the immediate interaction.

So Jung’s idea of collective projection does not have to begin with a mysterious group hallucination: An individually generated field can become socially propagated.

The collective can teach us what to see

This mechanism has enormous consequences, the collective does not merely teach:

what to believe.

It can also teach:

what counts as important;

where danger is expected;

what an expression means;

what kind of person deserves trust;

what behaviour is shameful;

which internal experiences are permissible.

Eventually the social construction disappears from awareness.

The person says:

“That’s just reality.”

This is one reason collective schemas are so difficult to recognise from within, their greatest power comes when they are no longer experienced as schemas, and they have become the field itself.

Projection can also be received

We therefore need a reciprocal process to projection, one that allows one person’s phenomenal construction can become incorporated into another person’s developing field.

A parent repeatedly experiences a child as:

selfish.

The parent’s behaviour changes around that assumption, and the child may therefore encounter::

criticism;
defensive anticipation;
different interpretations of identical behaviour;
repeated explanations of who they supposedly are.

Eventually the child may acquire:

“I am selfish.”

The parent’s projection has become part of the child’s phenomenal self-world. We might call this phenomenal incorporation.

The child does not merely remember that somebody once called them selfish, they now see their own behaviour through that inherited field and much later, individuation might reveal:

“This judgement of me was originally somebody else’s experience.”

The aim is not necessarily to erase it, it is to recover provenance.

A form of phenomenal solipsism

This helps clarify an idea related to solipsism: that classical philosophical solipsism concerns whether anything beyond one’s own mind can be known or shown to exist.

That is not what is being proposed here, our current theories assume that a relationship with other people, bodies, environments and collective structures exists.

But there may be a developmental phenomenon that could provisionally be called phenomenal solipsism:

from inside an undifferentiated phenomenal field, the field initially appears to be reality itself.

The frightened part does not naturally report:

“From my historically conditioned attachment perspective, abandonment currently appears probable.”

It says:

“She’s leaving us.”

The Lookout does not say:

“My threat-weighting architecture has identified an ambiguous cue.”

It says:

“He’s dangerous.”

The collective does not say:

“This is a culturally constructed judgement.”

It says:

“Everyone knows that, it’s obvious.”

Even when it is not. Each field initially mistakes its view for the view, and this shows how individuation can be used to progressively break that local solipsism.

Individuation as recursive decentring

If the child first discovers:

other people see differently from me.

Later:

my parents’ view is not necessarily my view.

Later:

one part of me sees this differently from another.

Later:

this part’s perception is shaped by its own history.

Later:

this domain is extremely knowledgeable within one jurisdiction and poorly informed outside it.

The developmental movement can therefore be understood as recursive decentring; the person does not reach a position without perspective, and they become increasingly aware of the perspective from which each perception arises. This is more modest and more useful.

Why the ego cannot simply take control

Once this architecture becomes visible, a tempting conclusion is:

Now the ego understands the system, it can finally control it.

That would reproduce the original problem, and I can suggest that the ego also possesses a phenomenal field:

It has:

limits;
preferences;
blind spots;
history;
social training;
and its own model of the organism.

Merleau-Ponty explicitly rejects the idea that reflection transports the observer completely outside the situation being reflected upon. The reflecting consciousness remains situated within the process it examines, and this aligns remarkably well with the organismic model.

The observer can broaden perspective, but it cannot become omniscient.

Seeing the system before regulating it

Cybernetics provides a useful analogy. Conant and Ashby’s classic Good Regulator Theorem showed, under its specified formal conditions, that a successful regulator must embody a model of the system being regulated. If we apply that systems principle then it is instructive.

An ego that thinks:

“The Lookout is irrational”

possesses a very poor model if “the Lookout” actually contains several specialised observers, a memory comparator and two outdated coping systems.

Regulation based on the coarse model will be coarse, applying individuation can increase the model’s resolution, enabling the system to discover:

who does what;

what information they possess;

what rules they are applying;

and where their legitimate jurisdiction ends.

Only then can coordination become appropriately precise, and the end result is not necessarily:

the ego now commands them.

Instead, it may be:

the ego finally understands enough to stop interfering with functions whose limits are better known locally.

Phenomenal sovereignty

This suggests the concept of phenomenal sovereignty, where an individuated domain becomes increasingly capable of recognising:

what it sees;
what information belongs to it;
what patterns it uses;
what biases it carries;
what it does not know;
and where another domain should take over.

The body-language reader does not need the ego to dictate how bodies should be read, it needs sufficient individuation to distinguish:

what I saw

from

what I predicted.

The attachment system does not need to be abolished because it occasionally overpredicts abandonment.

It needs to know:

this is attachment information, not a universal statement about the entire situation.

Sovereignty therefore means competence within limits.

A whole field cannot be created by one part

If this theory is right, the total lived field is not authored by a single participant, it is a negotiated or co-created organismic production.

One domain supplies colour.
Another supplies emotional meaning.
Another recognises the person.
Another retrieves the memory.
Another predicts danger.
Another notices opportunity.
Another supplies language.
Another remembers social rules.

The conscious person receives something resembling:

one world.

But the apparent singularity may be an achievement of coordination rather than evidence of one underlying author. That is the phenomenal equivalent of organismic multiplicity.

What happens as more parts individuate?

This proposal is interesting: As individuation progresses, the person may initially experience more complexity, not less. Instead of:

“I hate this person,”

they discover:

my boundary protector objects;

my frightened child expects abandonment;

my social part likes them;

my body reader distrusts their posture;

my verbal system thinks their explanation is coherent.

This can look like fragmentation if singularity is treated as health, but informationally it represents enormous improvement. The person has moved from:

one unexplained conclusion

to:

a differentiated map of its sources.

That is increasing wholeness through increasing resolution.

Projection withdrawal becomes field differentiation

Jungians often speak of withdrawing projection. This phrase can sound as though the task is:

stop seeing something that isn’t there.

The phenomenal-field model suggests a more constructive process, and withdrawal becomes:

identify the domain contributing the perception;

understand its evidence;

separate its evidence from its assumptions;

establish its jurisdiction;

allow the external person or event to become progressively less dominated by that one field.

The projection is not defeated, instead, its provenance is restored, and that allows the previously externalised psychological material to become relationally available.

The ghost can come home without disappearing

This may be the most important implication for the original article: that if an apparition represents an externalised psychological domain, successful individuation does not necessarily require destroying the apparition: The figure can remain, what changes is the relationship. At first:

“A ghost is haunting me.”

Later:

“This ghost appears when something specific happens.”

Later:

“The ghost knows something.”

Later:

“I know what domain this figure represents.”

Later still:

“We can communicate without needing the old frightening form.”

The image might disappear, change, or it might remain indefinitely. The developmental achievement is not disappearance, it is relationship and provenance, leading potentially to an organismic integration.

What about shared apparitions?

The earlier article also considered Jung’s later interest in reports of collective visions and other experiences apparently shared by several people. The phenomenal-field theory gives us at least one strong ordinary mechanism for shared projections.

People continuously alter one another’s expectations, they share descriptions, direct attention, communicate fear, provide categories, imitate one another, and collectively learn what to regard as meaningful. Thus, several people can come to inhabit strongly overlapping phenomenal constructions without requiring a direct transfer of visual imagery between minds.

That mechanism should always be investigated first because we already know that social expectations and group information can modify judgement and representation.

However, this does not settle every claimed shared paranormal experience. If carefully investigated cases remained in which independently reporting observers described highly specific common phenomena without ordinary informational exchange, those cases would constitute a different question.

At this stage, we do not need that stronger claim in order for the phenomenal-projection model to work. That stronger question can remain open.

The collective phenomenal field

We can therefore use the phrase collective phenomenal field cautiously. It need not mean that many minds literally share one visual cortex. It can mean that people within a relationship or culture develop sufficiently overlapping:

expectations;
symbols;
stories;
categories;
fears;
values;
and perceptual priorities
that significant portions of lived reality become mutually constructed.
A family can have a collective phenomenal field.
A religious community can have one.
A political movement can have one.
A psychiatric institution can have one.
A school can have one.

Its members do not see identical worlds, but they continually train one another’s fields. This may reveal some aspect of what people call an egregore.

Individuating out of the collective

This notion returns us to Jung ,and suggests that a central part of individuation is recognising where the collective has become confused with the personal. This phenomenal approach makes this more demanding than simply adopting unconventional opinions. To individuate one’s phenomenal field requires progressively discovering:

what was inherited;
what was learned;
what was projected onto us;
what we projected onto others;
what belongs to a particular inner domain;
and what remains when those contributions become visible.

The goal is not total separation from the collective, that would be another illusion. We are linguistic, relational and cultural beings, and the goal is differentiated participation.

I can belong without assuming:

what everybody around me sees must therefore be what I see.

The relationship to wholeness

This also gives a deeper meaning to psychological wholeness. and this wholeness may not mean that every domain eventually sees the same world. That might destroy the specialised perspectives that make organismic intelligence possible.

Wholeness means that those different worlds can remain:

represented;
related;
mutually intelligible;
and appropriately bounded.

The Lookout can say:

“I see danger.”

The Explorer can answer:

“I see possibility.”

The attachment system can say:

“I am frightened of losing this relationship.”

The conscious person does not need to choose one as the only reality before acting, the organism can discover:

what can all of these perspectives support together?

Joy and the phenomenal field

The developing theory has proposed joy as an orienting principle rather than a command, within the phenomenal-field model, that acquires another meaning; that as domains become more individuated, each becomes increasingly able to construct and communicate the reality appropriate to its own function.

The larger organism can then discover situations in which:

more capacities can participate;
fewer parts require chronic suppression;
conflicting systems can renegotiate old rules;
and life becomes increasingly congruent with the organism’s fuller range of possibilities.

Joy may therefore be experienced phenomenologically as:

the field becoming increasingly hospitable to the total organism.

This does not mean imagining a pleasant reality into existence, it means that the organism becomes increasingly competent at constructing and seeking environments in which its legitimate constituencies can participate.

A new model of apparition

We can now state the developing hypothesis more clearly:

An apparition-like experience may sometimes arise when a differentiated or dissociated organismic domain contributes a personified symbolic construction strongly enough to the phenomenal field that the representation is experienced as occupying external perceptual space.

The figure’s apparent autonomy may reflect the relative autonomy of the contributing domain.

Its symbolism may reflect the Human Symbolic Interface.
Its appearance may be shaped by personal memory and cultural imagery.
Its emotional force may arise from the domain’s own history.
Its persistence may reflect unresolved relational access.
Its transformation during individuation may reveal increasing provenance and functional specificity.

This is a theoretical model. Current perceptual science supports its component proposition that internally generated expectations, imagery and learned priors can influence perceptual experience.

Science does not presently establish the stronger claim that a particular autonomous thought-form is the author of a particular apparition. That remains to be investigated.

What this changes about the original theory

The original Ghosts as Externalised Projections treated the ghost largely as something projected outward from an unconscious complex.

The newer formulation changes the model in several important ways; projection is no longer merely an output, it becomes part of phenomenal construction. Also, the phenomenal field is no longer assumed to be singular, and it may contain contributions from multiple locally organised fields.

The externalised figure is no longer merely an isolated symbolic picture. It may be a relational representative of the domain producing the relevant phenomenal contribution.

Jung’s Shadow is no longer simply stored content, it becomes restricted provenance and relationship.

Individuation is no longer merely bringing a projection back inside, it becomes the differentiation of the phenomenal worlds contributing to experience.

And wholeness is no longer the achievement of one correct view, It becomes the ability of many perspectives to know their jurisdiction and participate in a common life.

Implication List

The value of this model depends upon whether it eventually produces researchable predictions. Among the clearest are:

Different individuated parts should display stable attentional and interpretive specialisations. If a particular part identifies itself as a body-language observer, its appearance should correlate with increased detection or weighting of bodily social cues rather than every type of information equally.
The same ambiguous external stimulus should be interpreted differently when different domains are phenomenologically dominant. Those differences should be systematically related to each domain’s history and claimed jurisdiction.
Successful individuation should improve provenance. People should become better able to distinguish sensory evidence, prediction, memory, emotional expectation and culturally inherited interpretation without necessarily suppressing any of them.
Externalised personifications should become more differentiated with sustained relational investigation. Their functions, limits and triggers should become increasingly specific rather than remaining infinitely general.
Collective expectations should be capable of altering individual phenomenal constructions. Existing work on conformity, stereotype-biased perception and expectation already supports parts of this prediction.
Reduction of distress need not require disappearance of personified phenomena. In some cases, improved relationship and provenance may be more important than elimination of the figure itself.

These questions would permit us to move from philosophical architecture towards empirical investigation.

Conclusion

Jung’s idea of the externalised complex may have been more profound than the simple metaphor of psychological material being “thrown” onto an otherwise neutral world.

If perception itself is constructive, then projection may participate in the production of the world as lived, and it can be proposed as:

the organism constructing that world is itself multiple.

Different domains may contribute different fields of relevance.

They notice different things.
They possess different histories.
They use different symbols.
They project different expectations.

Therefore, before individuation, their combined product may appear simply as:

reality.

Individuation progressively may reveal:

who is seeing;

what they are seeing;

what they know;

what they are adding;

what they inherited;

what they learned;

and where their jurisdiction ends.

A ghost, from this perspective, may sometimes be less usefully understood as an unreal object appearing in the real world than as a real phenomenal encounter whose psychological authorship has not yet been differentiated.

That does not decide whether every apparition is psychological, and Jung himself ultimately declined to make that universal claim.

This approach may allow something more useful, it may give us a way to investigate the psychological cases without first denying the reality of the person’s experience.

And it gives individuation a deeper meaning:

We do not merely discover the characters inhabiting the psyche.
We discover the worlds through which they have been looking.

Perhaps only then can the larger organism begin to recognise the phenomenal field it has been living inside all along.

References

Barnett, B. O., et al. (2020). Stereotypes bias face perception via orbitofrontal–fusiform interactions. The study found evidence that social-conceptual expectations can influence neural representations involved in face perception.

Conant, R. C., & Ashby, W. R. (1970). Every good regulator of a system must be a model of that system. International Journal of Systems Science, 1(2), 89–97. The formal theorem applies under specified assumptions and is used here as a systems analogy rather than direct psychological proof.

Dijkstra, N., et al. (2021). Mistaking imagination for reality: Congruent mental imagery leads to more liberal perceptual detection. Research demonstrating that internally generated imagery can influence source discrimination between imagined and externally driven visual experience.

Hardstone, R., et al. (2021). Long-term priors influence visual perception through recruitment of long-range feedback. Nature Communications. The study found stronger top-down influences during percepts congruent with established expectations.

Jung, C. G. (1920/1948/1969). The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirits. In The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Collected Works, Vol. 8. Jung’s treatment of spirit experiences through autonomous complexes provided the starting point for the original Ghosts as Externalised Projections article.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945/2012). Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes. Routledge. Of particular relevance are his discussion of the phenomenal field and his insistence that reflective awareness remains situated within the experience it investigates.

Pajani, A., Kok, P., Kouider, S., & de Lange, F. P. (2015). Spontaneous activity patterns in primary visual cortex predispose to visual hallucinations. Journal of Neuroscience, 35, 12947–12953.

Powers, A. R., Mathys, C., & Corlett, P. R. (2017). Pavlovian conditioning-induced hallucinations result from overweighting of perceptual priors. Science, 357, 596–600.

Rogers, C. R. (1951). Client-Centered Therapy. Houghton Mifflin. Rogers describes the self as a perceived object within the phenomenal field and the self-concept as an organised configuration of perceptions available to awareness.

Sun, S., et al. (2016). Social conformity persists at least one day in 6-year-old children. Scientific Reports, 6. The findings demonstrate that peer information can alter children’s subsequently expressed private judgements.