Abstract
This article explores the metaphor of the scapegoat by offering a case study taken from the history of France at the turn of the 20th-century. The case is presented of a French army officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, whose wrongful conviction for treason created an international sensation and tore French society apart.
The author outlines the general features of the scapegoating dynamic and applies them to the Dreyfus case. He sets out the flow of events from Dreyfus’s first trial through to the official declaration of his innocence a century after his conviction, illustrating the tenacity of the scapegoating dynamic when an entire nation is caught up in the process. The view is put forward that it was the dramatic intervention by the novelist Emile Zola in the Dreyfus case which arrested the scapegoating process. The author asks what the implications of this might be for group analysis.
At the centre of the Dreyfus case was the fact of his Jewishness. The author depicts anti-Semitism as a deeply rooted set of assumptions based on myths about the Jews. He touches on the origins of these myths in early monotheistic theology and in the political ideology of the Far Left and the Far Right. An explanation is offered for the persistence of these myths in our culture, which may extend to our understanding of myths surrounding other peoples and societies. The author concludes with some reflections on the recurring nature of the scapegoat phenomenon.
Introduction
The Dreyfus case, which ran from 1894 through several false resolutions to a final vindication of the man in 1995, began with an accusation of treason based on dubious and flimsy evidence. The prejudice of Dreyfus’s initial court martial and the succession of lies, falsifications and cover-ups which followed it, rapidly leaked out into French society and formed the basis of a furious dispute in which the relative merits of truth, justice, loyalty and honour were hotly debated against a charged background of anti-Semitic sentiment and accusations of endangering the security of the state.
Truth, justice, loyalty and honour seldom arise as topics per se in therapeutic discourse, yet most psychotherapists are familiar with individuals who feel that they have, in one way or another, been victims of travesties of these principles. So in the case of truth, we encounter people who feel they have been lied to or deceived. In the case of justice, there are those who feel that they have been the victims of miscarriages of justice in the courts or the workplace, while the issue of loyalty is often raised by those who feel that their trust has been betrayed in domestic or social contexts. Honour is a more elusive concept, but its dark side can be recognized in the form of disgrace, shame and humiliation in family life. All these sentiments, whether rooted in reality or not, make up the bread-and-butter of psychotherapeutic practice and can be specially tested within the dynamic matrix of an analytic group, where their origins, whether in family relationships or in the wider society, can be explored and confronted.
Group analysts, whose training is weighted towards empathy and insight (as opposed to forming judgements on what is right or wrong), have nevertheless not shrunk from attempts to address the conflicts underlying the social upheavals of our day, invoking where necessary the dynamics of therapeutically constituted large groups as a way of bridging the divide between the two worlds embodied in the often contradictory concepts of understanding and preventative action.
In this article my aim is to throw light on the way in which the ideals listed above, which are more likely to be disputed in the arenas of law and politics, can be used by those in power to justify a particular ideological position and marginalize those deemed to hold a different position. In turbulent times the process of disputation frequently leads to an attack on one person in the name of the greater good, or an attack on a minority group in the name of the majority. It will instantly be seen that what I am referring to is the ubiquitous phenomenon of scapegoating, the attribution to an individual or sub-group of characteristics which are perceived as harmful to the group as a whole.
General aspects of the scapegoat dynamic
Despite its centrality in group dynamics the concept of the scapegoat is only sparsely addressed in the clinical and group analytic literature. In their work with therapeutic groups, Kraupl Taylor and Rey identified as the unconscious driving force of the scapegoating process projection arising from the need to blame others and exculpate oneself (Kraupl Taylor and Rey, 1953). Subsequently, Foulkes and Anthony pointed out that the scapegoat may be selected in the first place on the elemental basis of being different and may become isolated ‘because of differences in age, sex, religion, class, race etc. (Foulkes and Anthony, 1965)’. They placed responsibility for mitigating this dynamic squarely with the conductor, firstly by carefully selecting the group and secondly by helping the group to recognize its unconscious intentions and so pre-empt the extrusion of the ‘innocent’ member.
Other writers on the subject saw the victim role as not quite so clear-cut and focused on the ambivalence inherent in the scapegoater-scapegoat relationship. Agazarian, in her extensive work on systems-centred groups, identified the ambivalent role of the scapegoat as someone who contains for the group both the wish to victimize and to be a victim. She saw this as a defence against differentiating and in the service of sadism (Agazarian, 1994). Nitsun, in his ground-breaking work on the phenomenon of the anti-group, recognized the premature and unexpected withdrawal from the group of an individual bearing the brunt of group criticism as a manifestation of scapegoating when the group is developing an anti-group dynamic. Nitsun argued that it could have an unblocking effect if the conductor were to redirect the aggression back onto himself or herself (Nitsun, 1996).
More recently, Friedman, working on a taxonomy of relationship disorders, has identified the ‘scapegoating position’ as a special group ‘figuration’ (a set of disordered relations within the group dynamic) in groups that fail to contain violence. In Friedman’s model scapegoating includes not only hatred and destructive fantasies directed towards the weak and strong alike but also a tendency to act out emotions violently, even to the extent of attempting to exterminate ‘the enemy’. He refers to ‘hatred-training in action’ an analogy of Foulkes’s ego-training in action, and cites the German group matrix leading up to and immediately after the Nuremberg race laws as an example of this. Drawing from his own experience of the highly militarized culture of modern Israel, (‘the soldier’s matrix’) he describes Israelis who are critical of the army’s actions or even not strongly enough identified with them as being at risk of being labelled as traitors. Moving away from such a matrix involves a distancing process which is crucial to regain the lost capacity for guilt and shame about committed crimes and the return of empathy for the victim (Friedman, 2015).
The leader of the group (whether therapist or head of state) is perilously close to becoming a scapegoat if the group matrix supports a power shift in the direction of values which lie in opposition to those of the leadership. In times of radical change this can be seen as ‘a revolutionary matrix’, one which is characterized by violent turmoil, the emergence of multiple foci of leadership and a groundswell of hatred. Taking the example of the French Revolution of 1789 I have traced the stages through which an absolute monarch (Louis XVI and his family), the aristocracy which surrounded him, the moderate revolutionary leadership which succeeded him and the radical revolutionary leadership which instigated the Reign of Terror were successively turned into scapegoats and either driven out of France, murdered or incarcerated (Behr, 2015).
A number of factors can be identified which can either encourage or inhibit the tendency towards scapegoating
Size of the group
The smaller the group the easier it is to detect and arrest the process which, if allowed to run its full course, would result in the isolation and expulsion from the larger group of the stigmatized person or sub-group. In a large group it is more difficult to predict who might become a scapegoat. This is because the interactions in such a group lay emphasis on the symbolic aura of a person rather than on distinguishable personality traits. It becomes more a question of ‘To which group does that person belong?’ rather than ‘Who is that person?’ When whole communities are implicated, the personal attributes of the chosen individual are miniscule by comparison with the group’s perception of that individual as a symbol, and symbolic associations are hard-wired in both culture and time.
Projection and splitting
Projection from ‘self’ to ‘other’ of attributes imagined to be harmful is at the heart of the scapegoating process. An admixture of fear and anger, reflecting the difficulty in tolerating uncertainty, especially in the face of a threat to the integrity of the group, impels the group to seek out a visible target which can be held responsible, blamed and ultimately removed from the group. The chosen object merely has to have symbolic significance for the group in order for this to happen. If the attack on the scapegoat is challenged a struggle develops which can lead to a split in the group.
Responsibility of the scapegoat
Are scapegoats partially to blame for their plight? There is no easy answer to this question. An example is the child who irritates in the classroom, is bullied by peers and designated as ‘vulnerable’ or having ‘special needs’ by teachers who privately wish the child away so that the work of the group can continue unimpeded. In this case hatred is tempered by compassion, both being governed by the ability (or inability) to encompass difference. Skilled therapeutic intervention can tease out the distinction between blame and responsibility and apportion ownership of projections to both the scapegoat and the scapegoaters. However if an entire community is the object of scapegoating projections the distinction between victim and victimiser is often blurred and it takes heroic action to counter the irrationality of the process. Too often the scapegoating situation goes unchallenged and runs a course ending in suffering and violence.
Power of the group leader
Power lies with the leader of a group to turn the group away from its drive to nominate and act against a scapegoat. In the wider society the power to either pursue or rescue a scapegoat is dispersed among many elements, including the political, judicial, military and clerical hierarchies, the press and the clamour of vox populi. Strong interventions are needed to challenge the assumption that the appointment of a scapegoat will solve a particular problem for the group. In a therapeutic group it is ultimately the therapist who has this power. Care is needed to achieve a balance between on the one hand confronting the scapegoaters with their projections and on the other hand steering the potential scapegoat towards an acknowledgment of those aspects of his or her behaviour which might be contributing towards the scapegoating process. By challenging the group head-on the therapist is courting failure and may end up by becoming yet another scapegoat. Robin Skynner, in his work with families, saw a therapeutic opportunity in this dynamic and intentionally drew the family’s hostility towards himself by identifying with the nominated scapegoat and then using his therapeutic ‘muscle’ to confront the family with their projections (Skynner, 1979).
The therapist is uniquely positioned to avert the fate of becoming a scapegoat, partly through a knowledge of group dynamics, and partly through being ‘the outsider’, in other words the detached person on the edge of the group with the power to rescue the group from its uneasy false solution of having to scapegoat one of its own members. The exercise involves not only confronting the group with its projections onto the scapegoat but confronting the scapegoat too, over behaviour which might have invited victimisation and contributed to the scapegoating process (Behr, 1994).
Differences between the scapegoat and the rest of the group
A group in the throes of a crisis or recovering from a disaster has difficulty in tolerating diversity and uncertainty. The urge to attribute blame to a discernible individual or to a distinct, easily identifiable sub-group is powerful. Communities which have become separated from the wider society, whether for religious, ethnic, gender or political reasons, are at risk of malign fantasies settling upon them. The accentuation of difference, for instance by wearing conspicuous attire, performing rituals and ceremonies which appear mysterious to those on the outside and speaking a language which differs from that spoken by the majority, increases the risk of being scapegoated. Scapegoating is especially prevalent in authoritarian societies, in which a culture of uniformity prevails, control and fear of change are the dominant emotions and leadership is exerted from the top down.
Trauma as the basis for scapegoating
In a traumatized community, as in the wake of a natural disaster, a period of economic privation or as a result of suffering in the context of warfare or revolution, simplistic solutions are sought to alleviate distress, often within a culture of blame. The uncertainty of being at the mercy of incomprehensible forces is difficult to bear and people cry out for explanations and reach for magical remedies. Paranoid thinking develops in which scapegoating flourishes. We can imagine a matrix impoverished by trauma, in which the enemy is sought inside the group and in which people who, despite their protestations of loyalty, come under suspicion of being members of the enemy group. The hunt for a scapegoat entails a satisfying sense of self-exculpation as well as the opportunity for taking revenge on an imagined perpetrator and eliminating those considered as traitors or purveyors of evil.
The specific context of the Dreyfus case
The sequence of events:
-The backdrop is formed by the Franco-German War. France, humiliated by its shattering defeat at the hands of Germany in 1870, struggles to recover its national pride. The honour of the army must be protected at all costs.
-In the aftermath of the war an atmosphere of tension and hostility prevails between France and Germany. In 1894 a letter is discovered, apparently written by a French Army Officer, in which secret military information is offered to the German Ambassador.
-Suspicion falls on a Jewish Officer by the name of Dreyfus. He is convicted by court martial, publicly degraded and sentenced to life imprisonment in solitary confinement on Devil’s Island, a former leper colony off the coast of French Guiana.
-Doubts about the authenticity of the evidence against Dreyfus and the lawfulness of the court martial are suppressed in a barrage of cover-ups and lies. The army argues that ‘reasons of state security’ forbid the disclosure of evidence. Attempts are made to overturn the conviction but are vigorously resisted by the army. Doubts are suppressed and a campaign of lies, falsifications, cover-ups and misleading ‘expert evidence’ is instigated.
-The conflict enters the wider public domain and becomes a conflict between military and civil judiciaries and between soldiers and politicians. The press and public are divided between pro- and anti-Dreyfus factions. Among the latter is a group who openly proclaim themselves as anti-Semitic.
-Civil unrest grows with the eruption of anti-Semitic riots and attacks on synagogues and Jewish-owned shops as the country becomes increasingly polarised. The evidence for and against Dreyfus’s conviction is rancorously disputed. The controversy dominates French politics, leading to the break-up of families and friendships.
-A few individuals stand out from the welter of conflict. One of these, Major (later Lieutenant Colonel) Georges Picquart, becomes convinced that Dreyfus is innocent and that the true culprit is a certain Major Ferdinand Esterhazy. Picquart gathers evidence to prove that the conviction of Dreyfus is a miscarriage of justice which has been bolstered by a tissue of lies and falsified documents.
-In January 1898 another figure emerges: the renowned novelist Emile Zola, who explodes onto the scene with an open letter to the French President accusing the government, the military authorities and the judiciary of a range of crimes directed at covering up the truth. Zola’s intervention causes a sensation and intensifies the controversy. Zola and Picquart are tried and convicted, the former of libel, the latter of having disclosed secret army documents to a civilian (his lawyer). Zola flees to England. Picquart spends almost a year in prison before the case against him is quashed. France comes under critical international scrutiny across Europe, and, overnight, in America. Mark Twain writes: ‘I am penetrated with the most profound respect for Zola and [filled] with boundless admiration. Such cowards, hypocrites and flatterers as the members of military and ecclesiastic courts the world could produce by the million every year. But it takes five centuries to produce a Joan of Arc or a Zola.’ (quoted in Halasz, (1955).
-Later in the same year one of the incriminating documents is shown to be a forgery but this fails to quell the anti-Dreyfus attacks. Rumours abound of a military coup and unrest mounts. Meanwhile, France suffers a further military indignity, the Fashoda episode, a military and naval confrontation on the river Nile, in which the French are forced by the British into a humiliating climb-down from one of their territorial claims in Africa. Dreyfusism has now become identified with the anticlerical and antinationalist Left.
-Evidence for a miscarriage of justice becomes overwhelming despite the obfuscation of the Army. In June 1899 Dreyfus is recalled to France for a retrial. A second court martial, held in the glare of world publicity, again finds him guilty but this time the judges are divided and the judgement is mitigated by undisclosed ‘extenuating circumstances’. The French president pardons Dreyfus, a ruling which frees him but deprives him of the opportunity to clear his name in court.
-Twelve years after the initial court martial Dreyfus is reinstated into the army. He is elevated to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and awarded the Legion d’ Honneur. Esterhazy is never tried for treason. He too flees to England, spreading a trail of misleading information. Eventually the French public lose interest in the case and the anti-Semitic press responsible for fanning the flames of hatred fades into obscurity.
-Dreyfus returns to active service, sees action in the First World War and dies peacefully in his family home in 1935, attended by his brother Mathieu and his wife Lucie who had both fought unceasingly from the outset to clear his name.
-A century later, the Dreyfus Affair continues to be an embarrassment to the French Army. Disputes arise over the positioning of a statue of Dreyfus, now discreetly hidden on a small square a safe distance from the Ecole Militaire. On 7 September 1995, just over 100 years after the first court martial, a French General, speaking on behalf of the army, officially declares Dreyfus innocent, something which the army had never done since the trial of 1894. The army, like the society of that period, says the general, had fostered both the old-fashioned and the modern prejudices against the Jews. The role of the Affair, he adds, has been to reveal the nature of a period, a society and an army (Cahm, 1996).
Discussion
The choice of Dreyfus as scapegoat
One man was singled out for no reason other than that he was a Jew. The army, desperate to secure a conviction, went to inordinate lengths to inflate those of his traits—a certain distance and aloofness in his nature—to imply secretiveness and therefore reflect badly on him. His virtues were glossed over, additional details were invented which would incriminate him, such questionable evidence as there was, was tampered with in order to present it as proof of his guilt and his lawyers were denied access to material which would have allowed him to conduct his defence.
There was nothing about Dreyfus’s personality or situation to point him out as a traitor. A devoted family man, living in comfortable circumstances, he had shown himself to be a model officer, dedicated to army service and with impeccable credentials as a loyal Frenchman despite his origins in the disputed territory of Alsace-Lorraine which France had ceded to Germany on the cessation of hostilities.
The Intervention of Emile Zola
Zola’s famous intervention in the case stands out as a powerful attempt to turn the tide of the scapegoating of Dreyfus. It appears in the form of an open letter to the President of France, Felix Faure, published on January 13th 1898 on the front page of a liberal newspaper, L’Aurore, under the title J’Accuse! In it he sets out in detail his findings on the iniquities of the case, denouncing in excoriating terms each of the parties involved in the crime and its cover-up. The passion behind Zola’s words and his reputation as an author of international renown amplified the sensational effect of the letter not only in France but in the anxiously observing wider world. J’Accuse is a magnificent testimony to the power of language to head off a scapegoating process in full flood. Here are some excerpts: A court martial has but recently, by order, dared to acquit one Esterhazy—a supreme slap at all truth, all justice! And it is done; France has this brand upon her visage; history will relate that it was during your administration that such a social crime could be committed. Since they have dared, I too shall dare. I shall tell the truth because I pledged myself to tell it if justice, regularly empowered, did not do so fully, unmitigatedly. My duty is to speak; I have no wish to be an accomplice. My nights would be haunted by the spectre of the innocent being expiating, under the most frightful torture, a crime he never committed. And it is too you, Mr President, that I shall call out this truth, with all the force of my revolt as an honest man. To your honour, I am convinced that you are ignorant of the crime. And to whom then shall I denounce the malignant rabble of true culprits if not to you, the highest magistrate in the country? (Halasz, 1955: 130)
(After denouncing the prosecuting officer as ‘first and most guilty of the fearful miscarriage of justice’, Zola goes on to describe how others, including the War Minister and the Chief of Staff, were implicated and charges drawn up: . . . as in some tale of the 15th-century, in an atmosphere of mystery, brutal tricks, expedients, all based on a single, inane accusation, that of having written the idiotic bordereau [the incriminating letter], for the famous secrets delivered were found to be almost valueless. And I insist, the core of the problem is here: it is from here on that the real crime issues, the shocking denial of justice which renders all France sick . . .’ ) (Halasz, 1955: 131)
Zola then peels off one by one the layers of malpractice surrounding the case and ends his letter with a series of ringing accusations directed in the main at named individuals: I accuse Colonel du Paty de Clam of having been the diabolical agent of the judicial error, unconsciously, I prefer to believe, and of having continued to defend his deadly work during the past three years through the most absurd and revolting machinations. I accuse General Mercier of having made himself an accomplice in one of the greatest crimes in history, probably through weak-mindedness. I accuse General Billot of having had in his hands the decisive proof of the innocence of Dreyfus and of having concealed it and of having rendered himself guilty of the crime of lèse humanity and lèse justice, out of political motives and to save the face of the General Staff. I accuse General Pellieux and Major Ravary of having held a scoundrelly inquest, I mean an inquest of the most monstrous partiality, the complete report of which composes for us an imperishable monument of naïve effrontery. I accuse the three handwriting experts, MM. Belhomme, Varinard and Couard, of having made lying and fraudulent reports, unless a medical examination will certify them to be deficient of sight and judgment. I accuse the War Office having led a vile campaign in the press, particularly in the ‘Echo de Paris’ and in ‘L’Eclair’, in order to misdirect public opinion and cover up its sins. I accuse, lastly, the first court-martial of having covered up this illegality by order, committing in turn the judicial crime of acquitting a guilty man with full knowledge of his guilt . . . The action I take here is simply a revolutionary step designed to hasten the explosion of truth and justice. I have one passion only, for light, in the name of humanity which has borne so much and has a right to happiness. My burning protest is only the cry of my soul. Let them dare to carry me to the court of appeals, and let there be an inquest in the full light of day! I am waiting. (Halasz, 1955: 134-135)
We can imagine the group of gimlet-eyed soldiers and judges, the scapegoaters-in-chief, having to react to this denunciation from a novelist renowned for his graphic and sordid portrayals of life amongst the workers of France. The scapegoating had been brought to a juddering halt by Zola’s articulation of the truth. But the end was by no means in sight. In fact, the turbulence worsened. Zola was rounded on and the Jews were subjected to even greater displays of abuse and mob violence. But the tide was beginning to turn and we can look on Zola’s sensational address as being in the nature of a powerful group interpretation to the French people which planted the seeds of doubt in an otherwise rampant scapegoating dynamic.
Soldiers against civilians
Other giants joined in the fray. At his trial for libel Zola was defended by Albert Clemenceau, brother of the more famous Georges (the ‘Tiger’) who was later to become the president of France who masterminded the treaty of Versailles after the First World War. Both brothers were staunch Dreyfusards, Georges Clemenceau representing the newspaper L’Aurore in the case.
The following exchange illustrates the conflict between the military and civil authorities:
Major Esterhazy, the witness and also the guilty party in the Dreyfus case was permitted by the judge to remain silent throughout the attempt to cross-examine him and left the court in a blaze of glory.
The dynamics of antisemitism
Disproportionate hatred and the power of projection
Hatred and projection apply to any scapegoating situation. So why did the case of Dreyfus unleash so much passion? The answer may lie in the convergence of hatred towards the Jews fuelled by centuries-old attitudes which have become embedded in the social unconscious through endless repetition. These attitudes, primitive in nature, come to the surface intermittently and are held in place by strong emotions unchecked by the higher faculties of reason and intellect. We recognize them as myths, a fact which does not signify them as either true or false but simply as part of the fabric of which the human narrative is woven.
Myths about the Jews
As we travel back in time ancient history merges into biblical texts and commentaries, in which the three monotheistic religions claiming descent from Abraham vied with one another for supremacy. It is beyond the scope of this article to unravel the politics of difference in the ancient Jewish, Christian and Muslim worlds. Suffice to say that stereotypes created of Judaism and its adherents since the dawn of monotheistic culture have been passed down from generation to generation and furnished the material for prejudices against the Jews fashioned in the religious doctrines of both Christianity and Islam and in the ideological warehouses of both communism and fascism (cf. Wistrich, (1991) and Nirenberg, (2013) for comprehensive surveys of the subject).
According to the literary scholar Erich Auerbach, a word may grow into a historical situation and give rise to structures that will be effective for many centuries (Auerbach, (1938), cited in Nirenberg (2013)). So it is that even today the word ‘Jew’ continues to carry an emotional charge, sparking projective mechanisms which lead beyond reality. The Jew as traitor in the story of Christ found resonance in the Dreyfus case, for example in the image of Dreyfus as Judas and described as ‘the man who will make the women of France into widows, make small children weep tears of blood and, for money, give over his fellow soldiers to the enemy bullets’ (Bergmann, 1992).
The alleged Jewish preoccupation with property and money was something which Karl Marx, himself of Jewish origin (his father was a converted Jew and his grandfather a rabbi) had much to say about. The following is typical of his many observations on the subject, leading him to the conclusion that the world needed to be ‘emancipated’ from Judaism: The God of the Jews has become secularised and is now a worldly God. The bill of exchange is the Jew’s real God . . . What is the object of the Jew’s worship in this world? Usury. What is his worldly God? Money. (Marx, 1844 [1959]: 37)
Marx deserves our consideration, not so much as a prototypal anti-Semite, but as a good example of how such habits of thought, splitting Jews off from the prevailing culture, could create new and powerful ways of thinking about the modern world. The fusion of Judaism with capitalism became a tenet of communist ideology, largely as a result of one its most influential thinkers.
Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, both Jews themselves and both members of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, were also keen to balance the equation of anti-Semitism by criticising their fellow-Jews’ participation in what they called ‘the sphere of circulation’, namely finance and commerce, postulating this as the cause of the hatred. However this was before the Second World War. Later, they acknowledged that the power of anti-Semitic hatred was far in excess of anything which could be termed ‘real’. How, after all, could millions have believed that the Jews and their conspiracies so threatened the world that they had to be excluded and exterminated?
Horkheimer and Adorno eventually concluded that the liquidation of European Jews was not grounded in reality and that anti-Semitism provided its adherents with a ‘cognitive comfort’: the fantasy that the gap between our understanding of the cosmos and its fearful complexity does not exist. What was pathological, they argued, was the absence of any reflection on the projective processes involved. The fantastic power that Jews had acquired in European thought was far in excess of anything that might be termed ‘real’. No matter how overrepresented Jews might have been among European bourgeoisie they remained a tiny minority of that class (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1944 [1997]).
Another German-Jewish intellectual who witnessed the horrors of the holocaust, Hannah Arendt, argued that the Jews, even though victims, shared ‘responsibility’ (her word) for the worldview built on their backs by virtue of their specific commitment to ‘bourgeois capitalism’. In her view too, Jews were inescapably bound to money and lived their lives as parasites upon a corrupt social body, a point of view which elided too readily into the Nazi perception of the Jew (Arendt, 1968).
For the Nazis, any number of justifications for anti-Semitism could be found: Jews were sub-human; Jewish intellectual life was decadent; Jews were the ‘spiritual carriers of the Bolshevik terror’; and in the words of Herman Goering, the Second World War was about ‘whether the German and Aryan prevails here, or whether the Jew rules the world’ (cited by Burleigh, 2000). Behind this Manichean split lurked Nazi fantasies of the purity of the Aryan race and its pollution by non-Aryans. The Jew was demonized as a grotesque, rapacious, evil figure, intent on world domination, and Nazi scientists lent themselves to this demonization by invoking specious genetic and anthropological theories to further their cause.
Nor did the shock of the holocaust bring an end to anti-Semitism. It remains a powerful theoretical framework for trying to make sense of an uncertain world. After the revelations of the holocaust anti-Semitism subsided into the recesses of the social unconscious, only to re-emerge in muted form as part of an ongoing critique around the legitimacy of the Jewish State of Israel and the role of the international Jewish community in its support. From antiquity through to modern times, the Jew has served at one time or another to occupy negative roles in many parts of the world, enabling many peoples to fashion tools with which to construct their reality.
Conclusion
I have drawn a comparison between a problem which I have encountered many times in my work as a group analyst and the case study, more than 100 years old, of a soldier who was put through a similar problem simply because he belonged to a group which itself had been earmarked for scapegoating. Fortunately, in today’s world, in which the knowledge of unconscious processes is filtering through from professional to popular domains, the problem can be discerned in its early stages and worked with. The Dreyfus case allows us to see how, if left unchecked, a scapegoating process can plough through an enlightened society like a malignant growth invading the body politic. What began as an accusation of treason from within the ranks of an army already humiliated and suffering from a sense of lost honour turned into a powerful incentive to turn that accusation into a guilty verdict. Truth and justice were the casualties in the argument which developed over whether the security of the state should take precedence over the rights of the individual.
The scapegoating process is a recurring dynamic based on a dangerous myth. There may be a sense of relief following projections onto the scapegoat but this invariably proves to be falsely founded. The illusion which prompts the search for a scapegoat has to be challenged by repeated iterations of the truth—that there are no carriers of innate badness within humankind. The Dreyfus case presents us with a vivid example of scapegoating in relation to the Jews, but the principle of insisting on transparency and truthfulness from the powers- that-be whenever the innocence of an individual or a group is called into question, must apply equally to every member of every minority group. In psychotherapy we work non-judgmentally on the borders of reality and fantasy. In law it is the distinction between truth and falsehood on which justice hinges. In both spheres the principle of open communication should be sacrosanct.