When we scapegoat, we project what is dark, shameful, and denied about ourselves onto others.
This “shadow” side of our personality, as Carl Jung called it, represents hidden or wounded aspects of ourselves, “the thing a person has no wish to be,” and acts in a complementary and often compensatory manner to our persona or public mask, “what oneself as well as others think one is.”
...Sylvia Brinton Perera in her book, The Scapegoat Complex, writes:
“We apply the term “scapegoat” to individuals and groups who are accused of causing misfortune. This serves to relieve others, the scapegoaters, of their own responsibilities, and to strengthen the scapegoaters' sense of power and righteousness. Scapegoating…means finding the one or ones who can be identified with evil or wrong-doing, blamed for it, and cast out of the community in order to leave the remaining members with a feeling of guiltlessness.”
The tyrannical force of scapegoating, with its cruel thrusts of accusatory judgments, can also erupt in our own backyards.
This closer-to-home variety of scapegoating is especially important to note since we may find ourselves condemning bullies and world leaders while denying our own inclination to split off and project fears and anxieties onto our intimates and neighbours.
The scapegoat-victim in families is often the “black sheep,” the child who, like the ancient sacrificial goat, serves the miserable role of carrying the unconscious shadow parts of her parents. These children may present with psychological problems and exhibit addictive or self-destructive behaviour, but a deeper look into family dynamics points to a lack of awareness of the influence of parents’ unconscious feelings.
Carl Jung believed that scapegoating revealed something fundamental about our psyche. He maintained that we all have a “shadow” side to our personality. As he wrote in Archetype and the Collective Unconscious, “The shadow personifies everything that the subject refuses to acknowledge about himself.” Our shadow aspects cause us anguish, and much of our mental energy is enlisted in the denial of our perceived imperfections, but we cannot see our shadow aspects except through projection. In Alchemical Studies, Jung wrote, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making darkness conscious."
“It is everybody’s allotted fate to become conscious of and learn to deal with this shadow. ...The world will never reach a state of order until this truth is generally recognized.” —Carl Jung, Collected Works, Volume 10, par. 455
--Dale M. Kushner (From the article, How Facing Our “Shadow” Can Release Us From Scapegoating).
art | Christian Schloe
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