Projection

Projection as a defense mechanism: I don't care what you think about me. But I know you're thinking about me.

I might not care about you but I need you. Because you are the Other to my conception of Self.

There is, then, a familiar type of composure that creates an appearance of self-possession . . . The mind creates a distance in the self — often in the form of an irony — from its own desire, from the affective core of the self, and manages, by the same token, a distance from everybody else. A sometimes compelling but ambiguous aura, by communicating a relative absence of neediness, renders the other dispensable. And this is done partly through projection; at its most extreme, the neediness is evoked in the people around and then treated with sadistic dismay, as though it were an obnoxious stranger. Hell is not other people but one's need for other people.

- Adam Phillips