Sylvia Brinton Perera

An in-depth study of victim psychology based on historical ritual dreams, mythology and case material. Shows that scapegoating is a way of denying one's own dark side by projecting it onto others.

Toward a Mythology of Shadow and Guilt

The Scapegoat Complex

Laura Mei

Originally the scapegoat was a human or animal victim chosen for sacrifice to the underworld god to propitiate that god's anger and to heal the community. Scapegoating, as it is currently practiced, means finding the one or ones who can be identified with wrong-doing, blamed for it, and cast out from the community in order to leave the remaining members with a feeling of guiltlessness. In Jungian terms, scapegoating is a form of denying the shadow of both man and God. Those who are identified with the scapegoat, on the other hand, are identified with the unacceptable shadow qualities. They feel inferior, rejected and guilty. They feel responsible for more than their personal share of shadow. The rejection is experience by the individual as a punishment for being. Guilt, inferiority feelings and a core of ever-present existential anxiety — from the lack of connection to the greater whole — are the individual's burden. They remain fixated on the Self in projection to the collective; they cannot find their own inner authority and the integrity of the individual conscience.

The scapegoat-identified adult, usually by nature especially sensitive to unconscious and emotional undercurrents, and often involved in a helping profession, was the child who picked up and carried the family shadow. Often there is a particularly strong unconscious bonding with the scapegoating parent, sometimes verbalized as a feeling that that parent needed or wanted the child's care. Scapegoat-identified individuals are those who perceived the denied shadow and felt responsible for it. They became hypersensitive to ethical and emotional issues and accepted the role of tending, by empathy and nurturing caretaking, the shadow qualities in others. Sometimes the scapegoated individual is cast in the role of the family sick member. The individual comes into therapy with a self-description of feeling like a criminal, pariah, or freak. Basic is the sense of isolation and guilt — a terrible foretaste of individuality from the position of the rejected and exiled one.

Exile is an archetypal image of the painful stimulus that forces individuals to seek for return and atonement with the transpersonal. To the scapegoat-identified individuals, the wilderness is an image expressing their existential experience of profound alienation and exile. It is the world of their own perceived reality that encompasses them, for they feel anomalous, outside the collective borders, beyond acceptance. Psychologically for these individuals, the wildness is analogous to their sense of paralyzed apathy, meaninglessness and abandonment-panic. It mirrors the pain of their never-belonging, of homelessness, of living in hiding. It is paradoxically also the place of their eventual reunion with the hidden individual Self. Because they feel radically unacceptable, their unmet longing has an unmediated archetypal flavor. Their exile is marked by an intense hunger for connection with both personal and transpersonal Other, even a palpable appetite for the divine. Yet it is also marked by a profound fear of all connection.

The alienated persona-ego learns to function in the world with varying degrees of success, adapting to external circumstances. It seeks its identity outside itself, attempting to meet the Self in projection upon others, and to find the acceptance that its role of sin-carrier and shadow-bearer inevitably prevents. Indeed, the shadow-carrying, alienated, and wandering ego longs so for an accepting collective that it will adopt any persona. It will placate, ingratiate, become indispensably competent, sell its soul, to belong to whichever collectives are valued — even as it is resigned to being an outcast and without the right to protect itself directly. It feels its special polluted burden, convinced that no one can accept it unless it performs agreeably and well. The persona-ego hides the collective shadow material with which it feels identified beneath its multiple roles and facades, wandering precariously, habituated to rejection and longing for release. But it also fears acceptance, for that would mean laying down the burden upon which its identity rests. 

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