The scapegoat occupies a central and structurally consequential position in the depth-psychology corpus, appearing across registers that range from archaic ritual to clinical group dynamics, from Jungian ethics to tragedy scholarship. Erich Neumann furnishes the most sustained theoretical treatment: in *Depth Psychology and a New Ethic* he demonstrates that the scapegoat mechanism is the collective’s primary instrument for externalizing shadow content, projecting disowned evil onto a marginal victim — be it a Hebrew ritual goat bearing the High Priest’s transferred sins, or a ‘great individual’ such as Socrates or Galileo sacrificed by group inertia. Jung himself, in the Zarathustra seminars and in *Civilization in Transition*, identifies scapegoating as projection institutionalized: what is unconscious within the community is discovered in the neighbor and punished there. Irvin Yalom and Philip Flores translate this dynamic into the clinical group, where the scapegoat absorbs the collective’s disowned ‘badness,’ relieving other members of the obligation to self-examine. Hillman reads Oedipus as the paradigm case of a city that imagines its cure through expulsion rather than transformation. Burkert and Kerenyi anchor the term historically in Greek pharmakos ritual and the sacrificial grammar of tragedy. The persistent tension in the corpus is between scapegoating as archaic psychological hygiene — temporarily effective, ethically primitive — and as a failure of individuation demanding conscious integration of the shadow.
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 defines scapegoat psychology as the earliest collective mechanism for making shadow-evil visible and expelling it, valid only so long as genuine group identification with the sacrificed victim persists.
, 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 the scapegoat archetype to modernity, arguing that exceptional individuals — Socrates, Jesus, Galileo — are unconsciously sacrificed by collectives unwilling to tolerate those who exceed the norm.
, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, 1949thesis
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 or put the screws on him; but we injure him by means of moral verdicts pronounced with the deepest conviction.
Jung identifies the scapegoat dynamic as the social expression of projection, wherein unconscious shadow content is attributed to and persecuted in another, replacing archaic physical punishment with equally destructive moral condemnation.
, 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 Protestant theological figure of Christ as a psychologically necessary scapegoat onto whom the burden of unresolved internal conflict is projected and displaced.
, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939, 1988thesis
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 argues that the Apollonic civic consciousness structurally requires a scapegoat, and that the Oedipus myth enacts this compulsion: the city’s mode of imagining health through expulsion produces the very victim it seeks.
, Mythic Figures, 2007thesis
the scapegoat and the identified patient are the two most frequently used roles. 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, they do not have to deal with themselves.
Flores, drawing on Agazarian and Jung, identifies scapegoating in therapy groups as a defensive projection of disowned negative self-aspects onto a single member, thereby foreclosing individual members’ self-examination.
, Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations An, 1997thesis
Bad feelings are subsequently split off and projected onto other group members. 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 th
Flores demonstrates that when a group leader requires idealization, splitting occurs and the scapegoat becomes a functional container for collectively disavowed frustration and aggression.
, Group Psychotherapy with Addicted Populations An, 1997supporting
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. It becomes a focus and gives special meaning to their lives.
Addenbrooke, citing Sylvia Brinton Perera, argues that recovering addicts who have occupied the scapegoat role retain an archetypal relation to the theme that can be transformed into vocation as wounded healers.
, Survivors of Addiction: Narratives of Recovery, 2011supporting
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-as-a-whole therapist must read scapegoating as a systemic defensive phenomenon — the group recruiting a member to carry projected material in lieu of collective self-confrontation.
, The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, Fifth Edition, 2008supporting
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 rite as the historical and ritual antecedent of the scapegoat mechanism, in which a marginalized human victim absorbs collective pollution and is expelled to restore civic purity.
, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, 1977supporting
in many primitive civilizations there is a group of jesters who have to do everything contrary to the group rules… There is here probably the vague idea that another side should also be brought into the open. It is a shadow catharsis festival.
Von Franz identifies institutionalized counter-normative figures — jesters, ritual transgressors — as collective shadow-catharsis mechanisms structurally cognate with the scapegoat, albeit oriented toward integration rather than expulsion.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting
scapegoat ritual, 82-4
An index entry in Burkert’s Greek Religion confirming that scapegoat ritual receives dedicated treatment as a distinct cultic category within the work’s broader taxonomy of Greek religious practice.
, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, 1977aside