The Religious Life: A Psychological Perspective

By Sylvia Swain

Continued from part 1

The Scapegoat Complex

An example of the part played by choice and motivation in the progress of the ego to either pathology or to a higher consciousness is that of the formation of the Scapegoat Complex.

Historically it originated as a religious method to purge guilt but later degenerated into pathology i.e. a negative complex in the collective shadow. Having developed our separate, what Phiroz described as ‘isolative self-consciousness,’ humanity could only conceive of God indirectly, in projection, and whilst this is the case that closer union which is the eventual goal is not possible. So we either live in our isolation, or we undertake that dark and hazardous pathway through the unknown before we can discover who we really are.

It has ever been the case; ‘Those things I would do, I do not; but those things I would not do, those things I do.’ Under the old black and white authoritarian religious systems, not only was evil in projection but so was good. With God in projection, and a great area of instinctive life in repression, the ways of good and evil were largely inexplicable and uncontrollable. Man felt himself to be the recipient of fate meted out by the gods, until the time of the coming of Christianity when, whilst still in the midst of a primitive polytheism, we were forced to adopt sophisticated doctrines of Christian grace and love. This produced, not a sudden conversion, as was hoped, but a dissociation between conscious and unconscious, something Jung described as “a peculiar twist”. The reason for this was that, although intellectually and philosophically we can absorb and agree with ethically higher doctrine, until we have developed to a sufficiently higher standard of psychological maturity, our emotions, feelings and desires will remain what they were, because we cannot transform the heart as easily as we can change the mind. This is because, whereas the thinking, reasoning mind is within the conscious domain, the emotions and passions originate in the unconscious. Even the rationality which over the years has served to distance us from faith in spirituality and in the existence of higher beings, cannot solve our ethical problems. As Jung explained:

This split between conscious and unconscious, meant that the conscious personality could become highly disciplined, organised and rational on the one side but the other side remains suppressed, cut off from education and civilisation, which explains our many lapses into the most appalling barbarity. And the more we climb the mountain of scientific and technical achievement the more dangerous and diabolical becomes the misuse of our inventions.

But he continued:

If the white man does not succeed in destroying his own race with his brilliant inventions he will eventually have to settle down to a desperately serious course of self-education.

Collected Works volume 10 paragraph 1010

So let us look at this general problem as it affects the inner problem of the individual, because it is only with the individual that real change can come about. For example, the popular press with its nose for scandal makes public scapegoats every day, but the real scandal is that many people read it in order to enjoy a vicarious participation in this unconscious, pagan ritual, because somehow it helps them to feel better about themselves. Jung observed that when we thus project our guilt onto others and exchange it for what he called an “infantile innocence,” we get caught up in an inescapable “causal nexus”, that is a group linked by a common cause of scapegoating, and without noticing it we lose our moral freedom, that is our individual conscience. He said:

Only a fool is interested in other people’s guilt since he cannot alter it. The wise man learns only from his own guilt. He will ask himself, ‘Who am I that all this should happen to me?’ To find the answer to this question he will look into his own heart.

Collected Works volume 12 paragraph 152

Let us look at the basic pattern of the complex, which can be understood as producing three types of participants:

1. The scapegoater who is a self-righteous perfectionist, a nit-picker, or a bully, punishing and condemning everyone else, the Inquisition type.
2. The victim with a negative self-image who feels personal inadequacy, and who accepts blame and punishment either from outside, or from inside as self-hatred.
3. One who develops both an inner accuser and an inner victim. It is the nature of the ego structure, with its twisted dissociation from natural reality, that it can, and frequently does, set unnaturally high goals for itself. Simultaneously it projects unreasonably black guilt not only onto others but onto itself. Through a lack of understanding and capacity the scapegoat, originally a religious archetype, has turned negative and has become no longer an archetype of atonement, but one of punishment and sickness disguised as an ethic.

As a consequence of this unrecognised, unaddressed problem, unlike the Indian gods based on the instincts, all the gods of modern man have become diseases. In his book Alchemical Studies Jung said:

We are just as much possessed by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms.

Paragraph 54

Though we may feel ourselves to be helpless victims of our history, of our society, of our parentage or whatever, and that we have in our turn to pass the whole thing on as reaction or revenge or just as our sickness, it is not so. Mankind, even in a psychological epidemic, does have a choice, but a choice that can be made only on an individual basis. Even during the Nazi epidemic, the classic example, there were some who did not succumb, yet those previously normal decent people who did succumb, did so through their shadow. Mass horrors always happen unconsciously through the shadow, through greed, people can be bribed: through fear, people can be coerced. Envy, spite or self-pity can turn people into informers and monsters, because these are virtually automatic reactions, whereas considered ethical choice involves conscious restraint, deliberation and ethical decisions.

Continued in part 3, part 4 and part 5

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