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Scapegoating is a frequently occurring social phenomenon which takes place in natural groups, therapeutic groups, families, and in society at large. Ghadiali's paper discusses the scapegoating process in a therapeutic community.
He links its historical meaning with its commonly accepted usage today. Quoting Krauple Taylor he says, ‘A scapegoat in the truncated sense is merely the butt of displaced aggression. It is more in keeping with the original purport of the term to define the scapegoat as a person who is made to suffer as a carrier of displaced guilt.’ In its biblical usage scapegoating was the ritual sacrifice of an animal through which sin or evil was magically transferred to that animal. It seems to me that the concept of scapegoating is essentially concerned with communal projections both in its present broad usage and in its original sense.
In his first example of scapegoating Ghadiali describes how the member of a group who was psychologically the weakest faced increasing pressure from the others and, although at one stage in the session they perceived their haranguing of him to be inappropriate, they felt compelled to continue with it. The author does not perceive the episode as merely defensive; he moves back and forth between viewing it as having positive value in that it contained the primitive feelings of the group and thus helped to maintain its equilibrium, and as being non-therapeutic in so far as it remained unconscious. I remain confused by his notion of scapegoating as a means of ‘acknowledging through denial’.
In the second example a therapist expels a member who has become impossibly demanding, thus making the remaining group more cohesive, and enabling its members to express their own needs. The therapist felt it was necessary to resort to the equivalent of the ancient use of the scapegoat as sacrifice. The author discusses this action as being potentially therapeutic. In terms of group analysis, however, the expulsion would not strictly speak