Scapegoat Mechanism

The scapegoat mechanism occupies a distinctive and contested position across the depth-psychology corpus, functioning simultaneously as a primitive psychological operation, a collective ritual form, and a persistent dynamic within therapeutic groups. Erich Neumann provides the most sustained theoretical elaboration, situating scapegoating within his analysis of the ‘old ethic’: when individuals repress their shadow contents rather than integrating them, those contents are evacuated onto designated others — inferior or outstanding personalities alike — who are then sacrificed on behalf of the collective’s moral self-image. Neumann traces this mechanism from Levitical ritual through the crucifixion of cultural heroes such as Socrates and Galileo, arguing that the process has become unconscious without becoming less lethal. Jung, in his Zarathustra seminars and in ‘Civilization in Transition,’ frames scapegoating as the institutional expression of projection — a civilizational failure to own the shadow — noting that modern societies produce scapegoats as surely as archaic ones produced pharmakoi. Yalom and Flores translate the mechanism into group-psychotherapy practice, where the scapegoat serves as the container for a group’s projected aggression and its avoidance of genuine self-confrontation. Hillman reads the Oedipus myth as the paradigmatic literary instance, in which the polis imagines its cure as expulsion. Walter Burkert grounds the Greek pharmakos rite in anthropological and ritual-historical evidence. Across these registers, the mechanism’s core logic is constant: collective anxiety is discharged by concentrating negativity in a single figure and expelling or destroying that figure.

In the library 16 passages

evil is recognised as belonging to the collective structure of one’s own tribe and is eliminated in a collective manner — for example by the High Priest transferring the sins of the people to the scapegoat as a vicarious sacrifice.

Neumann identifies the scapegoat ritual as the archetypal mechanism by which collective shadow is made visible and expelled rather than owned, representing ethics at their most primitive — group responsibility without individual integration.

Neumann, Erich, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, 1949thesis

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All nations and all periods of time have contributed to this scape-goat sacrifice of the outstanding, even if the ritual is nowadays no longer conscious but unconscious — a somewhat doubtful piece of progress.

Neumann argues that the scapegoat mechanism persists into modernity directed specifically against superior individuals, and that its becoming unconscious represents not moral progress but merely occluded repetition.

Neumann, Erich, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, 1949thesis

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those people who take it seriously must invent the idea of the scapegoat that is sent out into the desert to deal with their own sins, and they take Christ as the scape-goat. They burden him since he is the crucified, deified scapegoat.

Jung interprets the Protestant theological use of Christ as a psychologically driven scapegoat mechanism, a projection of individual moral conflict onto a divine carrier to avoid direct confrontation with one’s own shadow.

Jung, C.G., Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939, 1988thesis

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scapegoats, just as it formerly teemed with witches and werewolves. Projection is one of the commonest psychic phenomena… Everything that is unconscious in ourselves we discover in our neighbour, and we treat him accordingly.

Jung situates the scapegoat mechanism as the social expression of projection, demonstrating that modernity perpetuates the same psychic operation as archaic witch-hunting, merely with updated targets.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Civilization in Transition, 1964thesis

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Oedipus is the scapegoat because the city imagines itself in the manner of expelling evil. And it finds the scapegoat as prophesied because its consciousness fulfills its prophetic structure.

Hillman reads the Oedipus myth as demonstrating that the scapegoat mechanism is not accidental but structurally produced by a particular mode of collective consciousness that can only conceive of healing as expulsion.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis

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If the rest of the group can either spend their time attacking one member for containing all the badness (the scapegoat) or helping someone who contains all the sickness (the identified patient), they do not have to deal with themselves.

Flores, drawing on Agazarian, formulates the therapeutic-group scapegoat as the receptacle for collectively disowned shadow material, serving the defensive function of protecting the group from self-confrontation.

Flores, Philip J, Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations An, 1997thesis

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he might, for example, have raised the issue of whether the ‘group’ needed a scapegoat and whether, with Kate gone, Burt filled the scapegoat role; or whether the ‘group’ was actively avoiding an important issue.

Yalom illustrates how the group therapist must track scapegoat role-succession as a group-as-a-whole phenomenon, distinguishing it from individual pathology and linking it to collective avoidance.

Yalom, Irvin D., The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, Fifth Edition, 2008supporting

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The possibility of scapegoating is subsequently increased. The scapegoat serves an important function for the group. He or she is the container for the frustrations the group members have but cannot express toward the group leader.

Flores, integrating Bionian theory, identifies the scapegoat as the structural container for group aggression displaced from the idealized leader, increasing when the leader’s need for idealization keeps the group regressed.

Flores, Philip J, Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations An, 1997supporting

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some poor victim is bought every year as a purificatory sacrifice, katharsion; he is fed royally and then on a certain day is led through the city gates, made to walk round the city walls, and finally chased across the boundaries with stones.

Burkert documents the Greek pharmakos ritual in historical and comparative detail, providing the anthropological substrate for depth-psychological readings of the scapegoat mechanism as institutionalized purgation.

Burkert, Walter, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, 1977supporting

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after people become able to disentangle themselves from the burden of being a scapegoat, as many addicts are in their families or in society, they will still have a special relationship with this archetypal theme.

Addenbrooke, drawing on Sylvia Brinton Perera, argues that addicts frequently carry the scapegoat archetype for family or social systems and that recovery involves disentanglement from, yet ongoing relation to, this archetypal position.

Addenbrooke, Mary, Survivors of Addiction: Narratives of Recovery, 2011supporting

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he attracted the attention of the authorities by his attitudes and became a scapegoat in a situation in which many of his colleagues, who basically shared his political opinion, managed to survive without joining the system.

Grof illustrates how COEX-system dynamics can lock an individual into repeated scapegoat situations, with the core experience activating and reinforcing its own social repetition.

Grof, Stanislav, Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research, 1975supporting

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in both cases the collective has to pay for the false virtue of the individual. Suppression and, still more, repression result in an accumulation of suppressed or repressed contents in the unconscious.

Neumann establishes the energic precondition for scapegoating: the accumulation of collectively repressed shadow material that must eventually find an outlet, typically through projection onto designated victims.

Neumann, Erich, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, 1949supporting

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in many primitive civilizations there is a group of jesters who have to do everything contrary to the group rules… It is a shadow catharsis festival.

Von Franz identifies ritualized role-inversion festivals as collective shadow-catharsis mechanisms, a structural parallel to scapegoating that externalizes and temporarily absorbs what the group cannot consciously acknowledge.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting

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this inflation by the good conscience is not in the slightest degree disturbed by the acting out of a bestial shadow.

Neumann articulates the paradox of the ‘good conscience’ that enables scapegoating: collective ethical self-inflation is precisely what permits the unacknowledged enactment of shadow aggression against designated victims.

Neumann, Erich, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, 1949supporting

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‘Someone or other must be to blame for my feeling ill’ — this kind of reasoning is common to all the sick, and is indeed held the more firmly the more the real cause of their feeling ill, the physiological cause, remains hidden.

Nietzsche identifies the resentment-driven attribution of blame to an external other as the psychological precursor to scapegoating logic — the need to locate suffering’s cause outside the self.

Nietzsche, Friedrich, On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887aside

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the individual sacrifices (dismembers) himself so as to produce the world from his body: an ideology which we have seen to be the prototype of all impulse to artistic production.

Rank traces the sacrificial logic underlying scapegoat mythology to the primordial myth of cosmogonic self-sacrifice, positioning the willing victim as a spiritualized development of the original building-sacrifice.

Rank, Otto, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, 1932aside

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