Scapegoating and the Organization of Civilizational Aggression: A Developmental-Psychoanalytic Reading of Penal Policy
Abstract
This article revisits the psychoanalytic problem of scapegoating at the level of social institutions. Building upon classical formulations of aggression and projection, it proposes that criminal justice systems serve as containers for collectively disavowed hostility. Drawing on a developmental model of emotional civilization, penal responses are interpreted as expressions of dominant affective organization. Shame-dominant systems externalize aggression through punitive boundary enforcement, while fear-dominant systems convert deviance into illness, diffusing moral responsibility through regulatory containment. Oscillation between these poles reflects unresolved collective trauma and unstable differentiation between superego functions and reparative impulses. The article situates contemporary criminal justice volatility within a broader developmental trajectory from primitive exclusion toward differentiated accountability and empathic integration. Rather than treating penal reform as purely ideological conflict, the model conceptualizes it as a struggle over how aggression is symbolized, displaced, and metabolized within institutional structures. The framework extends object-relations theory into macro-social analysis and invites reconsideration of law as a developmental regulator of collective aggression.