The psychoanalytic claim: that people project their inner world onto others, itself entails treating others as mere screens for the self’s drama. It’s a meta-solipsism: accusing others of solipsism while enacting it in the very gesture of accusation.

This is where the critique folds back on itself. If I say, “You only see others as extensions of yourself,” I’m presuming access to your interiority — which is precisely the solipsistic move I’m condemning. 

Confusion and projection are not the same; confusion exists, and it is pervasive and it is sometimes honest. But the cultivation of confusion — the deliberate trapping of people in their own heads — functions as control. The meta-solipsism of projection theory is not a tool of insight but an instrument of malevolent confusion, disabling honest critique by turning every relation into an accusation.

Nietzschean version:
The psychoanalytic creed — that man projects his inner world onto others — is itself a projection: the world turned into a mirror, others into stage props for the self’s tragedy. Behold the meta-solipsist! He condemns others for seeing only themselves, yet does so by claiming to see inside them. His insight devours itself.

Confusion is not the same as projection. Confusion exists — vast, impersonal, unchosen, honest sometimes. But projection is the confusion of those who think themselves lucid. To trap a mind in its own reflection and call it “depth” — this is the cleverest cruelty. Thus the priests of interpretation reign: they make the labyrinth and then accuse the lost of narcissism.