scapegoating, crucifixion and witch hunt

The Deep Psychological Mechanisms of Scapegoating, Crucifixion, and Witch Hunts: Perspectives from Freud, Nietzsche, and Eric Berne

At the heart of human history lies a recurring ritual: the selection and destruction of a scapegoat. Whether it is an animal on the altar, a crucified rebel, a living creature walled into a building, or a woman burned at the stake, the pattern is ancient and disturbingly consistent. Humanity invents a debt owed to the gods or to fate, then convinces itself that this debt can be paid by punishing a chosen victim. The provided historical examples illustrate this mechanism with brutal clarity: from Roman crucifixions of rebels and regime enemies (intended to publicly settle a collective “guilt”), to medieval superstition that walled living animals into buildings to bribe the devil, to the Catholic Church’s systematic persecution under the Malleus Maleficarum (“Hexenhammer”), and finally to the 17th-century witch hunts in New England, which targeted religious dissenters. These are not isolated cruelties. They are psychological dramas enacted on a societal scale. To understand the deep mechanisms driving them, we turn to three towering thinkers: Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Eric Berne.

Freud: Projection, Collective Guilt, and the Return of the Repressed

For Freud, scapegoating is a massive collective defense mechanism rooted in projection and the management of unconscious guilt. In Civilization and Its Discontents and Totem and Taboo, he describes how every society rests on a primal crime (the killing of the father) that leaves behind an unpayable debt to authority. This guilt cannot be tolerated consciously, so it is projected outward onto a substitute victim. The “sacrificial animal on the altar” is the literal embodiment of this process: humans feel they owe something to the gods, and the shaman-priest offers a simple, bloody solution — blame a specific person for plagues, disasters, or social unrest. By destroying the scapegoat, the group achieves catharsis. The repressed aggression and guilt are discharged, and social order is momentarily restored.

Crucifixion and witch hunts represent the same mechanism in heightened form. The Roman cross was not merely punishment; it was public theater designed to show that “a debt had been settled.” The victim became the container for the crowd’s collective anxiety. In the Middle Ages, the Church’s torture and burning of “witches” served an identical purpose: the Malleus Maleficarum provided the legal and theological script, turning individual women into living embodiments of projected evil. Freud would see this as the superego’s demand for punishment being displaced from the group onto the outsider. The victim is never truly guilty of the crime attributed to them; they are guilty only of being available to carry the group’s unacknowledged sins.

Nietzsche: Ressentiment, Priestcraft, and the Invention of Evil

Nietzsche takes the analysis one step further and makes it moral and genealogical. In On the Genealogy of Morality, he argues that scapegoating is the central tool of “priestly” manipulation and the slave revolt in morality. Weak, resentful people (and the cunning shamans who lead them) cannot bear their own powerlessness. Instead of confronting it, they invent an external enemy — “the evil one” — and define themselves as “good” by contrast. The “evil seductive shamans” of the user’s text are Nietzsche’s priests par excellence: they redirect the masses’ suffering into moral outrage against a designated culprit. Plagues and natural catastrophes are never random; they are caused by someone — the rebel, the heretic, the witch.

Crucifixion, for Nietzsche, is the ultimate spectacle of ressentiment: the strong (the Roman state) and the weak (the mob) temporarily unite in the joyous destruction of a scapegoat. The victim is crucified not because they are dangerous, but because their suffering affirms the crowd’s moral superiority. The medieval witch hunts and the New England trials follow the same logic. The Hexenhammer and the Salem accusations were priestly instruments that transformed vague social anxieties into concrete, burnable evil. Nietzsche’s chilling insight is that the scapegoat is necessary for the psychological survival of slave morality: without someone to hate and punish, the resentful cannot feel virtuous. The mechanism is not about justice; it is about power through the creation of guilt and the ritual discharge of that guilt onto another.

Eric Berne and Transactional Analysis: The Scapegoating Game

Eric Berne’s Transactional Analysis (TA) brings the same phenomenon down to the level of everyday interpersonal “games.” In Games People Play, Berne shows how people unconsciously enact scripted roles to avoid real intimacy and responsibility. Scapegoating is one of the most powerful group games: it is the societal version of the Karpman Drama Triangle (Persecutor–Victim–Rescuer), which Berne’s work helped popularize.

In the scapegoating game:

- The Critical Parent ego state (the Church, the state, the shaman, the mob) accuses and condemns.

- The Adapted Child ego state (the designated witch, rebel, or outsider) is forced into the Victim role.

- The Rescuer (often the same authorities who created the crisis) steps in to “save” the group by destroying the Victim.

The psychological payoff is enormous. The group avoids looking at its own failings — economic hardship, disease, religious doubt — by playing “If It Weren’t for You/Her/Them.” The Romans could pretend their empire’s problems were solved by one crucified rebel. Medieval villagers could sleep better knowing the “devil” had been bribed with a walled-up animal or a burned witch. The New England Puritans could reassure themselves that their community’s tensions came from “dissenters,” not from their own rigid theology. Berne would call this a “hard” game because it is played at the cultural level with lethal stakes, yet the rules remain the same: someone must be blamed so that everyone else can feel innocent and united.

Synthesis: One Ancient Mechanism, Three Explanations

What unites Freud, Nietzsche, and Berne is the recognition that scapegoating, crucifixion, and witch hunts are not aberrations — they are the default psychological technology humans use to manage collective anxiety, guilt, and resentment. Freud supplies the unconscious machinery (projection and catharsis). Nietzsche exposes the moral fraud (ressentiment and priestly power). Berne reveals the transactional script (the Drama Triangle played out across centuries). The “sacrificial animal on the altar” is the same figure who ends up on the cross or the stake: a human being chosen to carry the group’s shadow so the group can feel clean again.

The mechanism persists because it works — at least temporarily. It converts diffuse fear into focused rage, transforms guilt into righteous punishment, and turns a fractured society into a temporarily unified mob. Yet the price is always the same: the destruction of the innocent, the reinforcement of authoritarian control, and the postponement of genuine self-examination. Understanding these deep psychological drivers — through Freud’s lens of the repressed, Nietzsche’s genealogy of resentment, and Berne’s transactional games — is the first step toward refusing to play the game at all.