Scapegoat

The scapegoat is the figure — individual or group — onto whom a collective’s rejected shadow is loaded and against whom its violence is then discharged. The mechanism is psychic before it is social: the group disowns a portion of itself, finds a carrier for it, and experiences the carrier’s destruction as the purification of the group.

carl-jung‘s diagnosis in The Undiscovered Self is precise: “In accordance with the prevailing tendency of consciousness to seek the source of all ills in the outside world, the cry goes up for political and social changes which, it is supposed, would automatically solve the much deeper problem of split personality” (Jung 1957, §558). The demand for external change is the scapegoat’s prerequisite. The scapegoat is the figure against whom the demand is then concretised.

erich-neumann‘s Origins and History of Consciousness and Depth Psychology and a New Ethic turn the analysis ethical. The “old ethic” — collectively sanctioned conscience — requires a scapegoat structurally: what the group declares good must be externalised, what it declares bad must be expelled. The anonymity of the mass intensifies the process: “the Nazis were obliged to remove the assassin from his own group” (Neumann 2019 [1949]), because only the atomized subject is free of the local pressures that a face-to-face community exerts against its own worst impulses. The “new ethic” — the ethic commensurate with a psychology that knows the unconscious — refuses the scapegoat: each subject carries their own portion of the darkness, and the collective shadow cannot be offloaded onto an external carrier.

The scapegoat is therefore not a mere sociological datum but an archetypal mechanism. Wherever a culture locates the source of its suffering in a single figure or identifiable outsider, the image is worth reading against the collective-shadow it is carrying.

Relationships

Primary sources

the-undiscovered-self (Jung 1957)
neumann-origins-history-consciousness (Neumann 1949)