Scapegoat psychology occupies a distinctive and consequential position within the depth-psychological corpus, serving as a diagnostic concept for collective moral evasion as much as a clinical observation. Neumann’s Depth Psychology and a New Ethic provides the most sustained theoretical treatment, situating the scapegoat mechanism within the developmental arc of ethics itself: it belongs to a primitive but psychologically coherent phase in which collective guilt is exteriorized onto a sacrificial vessel — whether an animal, an outcast, or an exceptional individual — and ritually expelled. For Neumann, this mechanism persists in modernity as shadow projection, where the unacknowledged inferior contents of a group are violently assigned to designated others. Jung amplifies this reading in Civilization in Transition and the Zarathustra seminars, linking scapegoating to the near-universal human refusal of self-knowledge and the compulsive attribution of evil to ‘the others.’ Hillman brings a mythopoeic refinement, reading Oedipus as the city’s scapegoat — a structural necessity of the Apollonic political imagination. Group-therapeutic literature (Yalom, Flores) extends the concept into clinical practice, where scapegoating emerges as a group-defensive operation displacing shared anxiety onto a single member. Across these registers, a central tension persists: scapegoating is simultaneously archaic and contemporary, collective and intrapsychic, ritual purgation and ongoing injustice.
the scapegoat psychology is still dominated by ethics at their most primitive level — that is, by group responsibility and group id
Neumann theorizes scapegoat psychology as an early, collectively-operative ethical stage in which shadow contents are projected onto a sacrificial victim and ritually expelled, valid only so long as the collective genuinely identifies with the vicarious sacrifice.
, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, 1949thesis
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 extends scapegoat psychology beyond the ritually inferior to include the culturally superior individual — the genius, the saint, the prophet — sacrificed by the collective’s resistance to exceptional demands, now enacted unconsciously.
, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, 1949thesis
the encounter and reconciliation with the shadow is in very many cases a sine qua non for the birth of a genuinely tolerant attitude towards other people, other groups and other forms and levels of culture.
Neumann argues that shadow integration is the direct antidote to scapegoat psychology, as projection of the inferior onto others ceases only when the individual assimilates their own shadow.
, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, 1949thesis
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 a structural demonstration of scapegoat psychology: the Apollonic civic imagination generates its own scapegoat as a necessary product of its mode of imagining governance and the expulsion of evil.
, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis
Projection is one of the commonest psychic phenomena… Everything that is unconscious in ourselves we discover in our neighbour, and we treat him accordingly. We no longer subject him to the test of drinking poison; we do not burn him… but we injure him by means of moral verdicts pronounced with the deepest conviction.
Jung identifies the modern continuity of scapegoating in the mechanism of projection, whereby unconscious shadow contents are attributed to a neighbor who is then persecuted through moral condemnation rather than ritual violence.
, Civilization in Transition, 1964thesis
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 theological figure of Christ as the ultimate cultural scapegoat, arguing that Protestant conscience externalizes its unresolved moral conflict by projecting it onto a redemptive divine victim.
, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939, 1988supporting
the person who speaks a truth that a family or a group does not want to hear can become the scapegoat… If the rest of the group can either spend their time attacking one member for containing all the badness (the scapegoat)… they do not have to deal with themselves.
Flores translates the scapegoat mechanism into group-therapeutic terms, identifying it as a defensive operation by which the group assigns its collectively disowned badness to a single member, foreclosing genuine self-examination.
, Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations An, 1997supporting
the therapist had many process commentary options… 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.
Yalom treats scapegoating as a clinically observable group-as-a-whole phenomenon requiring explicit therapeutic address, naming it alongside norm-setting, role suction, and emotional contagion as a fundamental group dynamic.
, The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, Fifth Edition, 2008supporting
it is always ‘the others’ who do them… Man has done these things; I am a man, who has his share of human nature; therefore I am guilty with the rest and bear unaltered and indelibly within me the capacity and the inclination to do them again at any time.
Jung challenges the foundational psychological premise of scapegoating — the attribution of collective evil exclusively to ‘the others’ — by insisting on the universal human complicity in destructive potential.
, The Undiscovered Self, 1957supporting
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 provides the ritual-historical documentation of the pharmakos tradition in ancient Greece, establishing the anthropological substrate of scapegoat psychology as it was institutionalized in archaic civic purification rites.
, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, 1977supporting
in many civilizations religious rituals tend to make a group aware of its own shadow… It is a shadow catharsis festival.
Von Franz situates scapegoat-adjacent ritual practices — shadow catharsis festivals, jesters, and counter-religious ceremonies — as culturally sanctioned attempts to render the collective shadow visible, in contrast to its modern unconscious projection.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting
Child made family scapegoat
Bowlby’s reference index cites clinical literature on the child designated as family scapegoat, indicating the concept’s application in attachment-oriented family systems work.
, A Secure Base: Clinical Applications of Attachment Theory, 1988aside
‘The Jew as Scapegoat’ (Hillman)
Russell’s bibliographic citation of Hillman’s essay ‘The Jew as Scapegoat’ attests to Hillman’s direct engagement with scapegoat psychology as a socio-political and depth-psychological phenomenon.
, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023aside
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 describes the energic economy of suppression and repression that generates the shadow-surplus subsequently available for scapegoat projection, framing the individual’s false virtue as a cost borne collectively.
, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, 1949aside