Scapegoating

A scapegoat may be an adult, child, sibling, employee, peer, ethnic, political or religious group, or country.

[1] A medical definition of scapegoating is:[2] Process in which the mechanisms of projection or displacement are used in focusing feelings of aggression, hostility, frustration, etc., upon another individual or group; the amount of blame being unwarranted.

As an ancient social process to rid a community of its past evil deeds and reconnect it to the sacred realm, the scapegoat appeared in a biblical rite,[4] which involved two goats and the pre-Judaic, chthonic god Azazel.

Themselves often wounded, the scapegoaters can be sadistic, superego accusers with brittle personas, who have driven their own shadows underground from where such are projected onto the victim.

The scapegoated victim may then live in a hell of felt unworthiness, retreating from consciousness, burdened by shadow and transpersonal guilt,[7] and hiding from the pain of self-understanding.

"[9] Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung considered indeed that "there must be some people who behave in the wrong way; they act as scapegoats and objects of interest for the normal ones".

[10] The scapegoat theory of intergroup conflict provides an explanation for the correlation between times of relative economic despair and increases in prejudice and violence toward outgroups.

[14] Literary critic and philosopher Kenneth Burke first coined and described the expression scapegoat mechanism in his books Permanence and Change (1935),[15] and A Grammar of Motives (1945).

Social order is restored as people are contented that they have solved the cause of their problems by removing the scapegoated individual, and the cycle begins again.