The shadow, which is in conflict with the acknowledged values, cannot be accepted as a negative part of one's own psyche and is therefore projected -that is, it is transferred to the outside world and experienced as an outside object. It is combated, punished, and exterminated as "the alien out there" instead of being dealt with as "'one's own inner problem''. The way in which the old ethic provides for the elimination of these feelings of guilt and the discharge of the excluded negative forces is in fact one of the gravest perils confronting mankind. What we have in mind here is that classic psycho-logical expedient -the institution of a scapegoat.
— Erich Neumann
Neumann is describing something more precise than simple blame-shifting. The scapegoat mechanism is not a failure of moral imagination — it is the old ethic working exactly as designed. When a culture's value-system demands that the negative be excluded rather than integrated, the psyche must find somewhere for that weight to go, and the somewhere is always a body, a people, a class, a nation. The excluded contents do not disappear; they concentrate and return as persecution.
What makes this structural rather than individual is the word "institution." The scapegoat is not a mistake someone makes in a bad moment. It is the psyche's logical solution to an impossible demand: be good by expelling what is bad. The demand survives in secular form as perfectly as it did in the sacrificial. Progress-myths, therapeutic cultures, political righteousness — each can run the same mechanism while using different vocabulary for the carrier.
The person who has never examined which part of themselves they have placed "out there" in the alien other is not ethically neutral. They are, in Neumann's reading, among the most dangerous — because the force of an unintegrated shadow does not diminish with moral certainty. It compounds with it.
Erich Neumann·Depth Psychology and a New Ethic·1949