Is it real or is it a projection?

I've been reading Marie-Louise von Franz's book The Interpretations of Fairy Tales and came across the following:

"Men [and women] who know nothing about psychology tend simply to project the anima onto a real woman, experiencing her [his anima] entirely outside. But if through psychological introspection they realize that the attraction exerted upon them by the anima is not only an outer factor but is something they carry within themselves - an inner image of a feminine being which is the true ideal and soul guide - then often, as a next problem, the ego raises a pseudo-conflict between the inner and outer realms by saying, "I don't know if this dream figure is my anima inside or if it concerns the real woman outside...[C]onsciousness, with its extraverted bias, gets caught in a false conflict between concrete outer and symbolic inner realization and in this way cuts the phenomenon of the anima artificially in two.

"To get into this conflict indicates a lack of feeling-realization; it is a typical conflict, raised not by the feeling function but by thinking, which makes an artificial contrast between inside and otuside, between ego and object. Actually the answer is that it is neither the outside nor the inside because it has to do with the reality of the psyche perse, and that is neither outside nor inside. It is both and neither. It is precisely the anima which has to be realized as a reality per se. If she, the anima, likes to come from the outside, she has to be accepted there. If she likes to come from within, she has to be accepted there."

(Page 94)

The question of anima/animus projection and whether or not our romantic relationships are a useful place to work out those issues has been on the back burner of my mind for a while, since I wrote Thoughts on the animus/anima. In that post, I wrote about how our animus makes itself felt in the kinds of stories we find ourselves drawn to, as if we're instinctively drawn to working through those issues, and I was warned about the dangers of projection, something I'd never even heard of.

Further reading showed that yes, projection was problematic, and probably quite common, the reason so many people fall in and out of love all the time. BUT I felt as if it could be helpful if used consciously, asking the right questions: Am I projecting? What am I projecting? And exploring the projection. Also, I felt that, although we need to be dealing with the true people themselves in our relationships, an element of projection might be useful in romantic relationships, adding a tinge of the eternal.

Reading the above quote by von Franz has added an extra layer to this issue: While it's undoubtedly good that we're progressing from viewing others and the world purely in primitive, symbolic and superstitous terms, we can lose sight of the fact that, to our subconscious, everything actually is one, and the person as a symbol and what the symbolic person stands for are one and the same. The problem isn't to figure out which one it is - it's not an either/or thing. The problem is to be conscious about it, seeing which direction it's coming from, now from the inside and now from the outside, and deal with it as it comes up.