As we move through life, we become socially adapted people. Adaptations are not always good, as they can create a split between who we really are and what we are being shaped to be. We stop thinking for ourselves, abandon the inner voice, and adapt to what is expected rather than living the life we were meant to live. It starts at home with our parents but continues through education, social groups, and employment.
An unadapted person, the one not playing the societal role, is often looked at in a negative light. They can be seen as different, a threat, unhinged, unstable, evil, sinful, demon possessed, crazy, and dangerous. Those who are unadapted often become scapegoats. Scapegoating is an attack on the good that allows the scapegoater to get off the hook. Purity and balance are achieved through the condemnation of a scapegoat. The scapegoater gets relief, self-righteousness, and a sense of unity. The scapegoat becomes the container for what the scapegoater cannot face in itself. Without the scapegoat, the house of cards falls, and the accusers are exposed.
Most of us have known someone who was “unstable,” “crazy,” or “the problem.” This often happens with groups or communities — they find a scapegoat in order to preserve the pseudo health of the community at the expense of the scapegoat and the community itself.
In other words, what looks like one person’s craziness could be where the community concentrates and stores their own disorder. It may look like possession from the outside, but the real problem lies elsewhere.
The Bible’s stories of demon possession undoubtedly describe encounters with very real evil. But beneath the surface of a few, we are given a window into other psychological and social problems. The story of the demoniac in the New Testament illustrates this dynamic, showing how a community can concentrate its own disorder into one person. Jesus’ encounter with the demoniac is a parable of individuation; the process of becoming oneself distinct from the collective and refusing to carry the unconscious material of others. This is costly because it is painful for the scapegoat to bear, and the resulting wholeness and healing can often look like madness or rebellion to the group. Healing removes the psychological function the person once served. When that function is removed in the story of the demoniac, it is destabilizing for the community and produces fear and expulsion. It forces them to face what they are trying to avoid. As we’ll see, this requires a compassionate encounter.
The demoniac is both possessed and not possessed. He is afflicted by many things, and a great deal of his suffering arises because he is the one carrying the possession of the collective. The possession doesn’t belong to him. The demoniac is a scapegoat, and his healing reveals the real problem: the rejected outsider who carries the unconscious projections of the group. As Carl Jung wrote in 1957, “Their mental state is that of a collectively excited group ruled by affective judgments and wish fantasies. In a milieu of this kind they are the adapted ones, and consequently they feel quite at home in it” (The Undiscovered Self, pg. 14). The mass appears normal but is disordered. The man, by contrast, has become free from what has been projected unto him. He experiences healing and a new birth. This experience produces fear in the collective.
This is what can happen to a person who goes from scapegoat to an individuated person. His wholeness is perceived as a threat. A healed man, thinking for himself, exposes the unconscious evil this Gentile crowd cannot face. In response, the community reacts with fear. A mob forms. Jesus is run out of town.
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Jesus meets the man the moment Jesus arrives in the country by boat. As soon as he steps ashore, the naked demoniac appears. He’s wild and immediately confrontational. The man, or the legion within him, pleads with Jesus to send the demons into a nearby herd of swine. Jesus consents. The demons enter the pigs, which rush into the sea and drown.
After this strange meeting, we find the man transformed: seated beside Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind.
But what happened to bring him to this state of exile, suffering, and torment? What kind of journey leads a person to this type of madness? Mark 5:15 offers clues to his backstory: “And they came to Jesus, and see him that was possessed with the devil and had the legion, sitting, and clothed, and in his right mind: and they were afraid.”
Why would someone be afraid of a man who is finally sitting, clothed, and in his right mind? Why would this provoke fear? And why would the community respond by expelling Jesus for helping him? The experience of wholeness should be celebrated, like the returning of a prodigal who quit his job feeding swine. But this individuated person provoked fear. His integration confronts them with their own disintegration.
He can’t find a home. Physically, psychically, and socially he is displaced. In Luke’s account we get an added detail: “And when he went forth to land, there met him out of the city a certain man.” He has been to the city then to the country and has been evicted everywhere he went. He is rejected everywhere he goes. A person like him is treated as dead, so the collective exiles him to living in the tombs. He was relegated to outside the place of the living and banished to the underworld. He was treated as a dead person.
This is where Jesus first found him: among the tombs. It is the archetypal place of descent. What he suffers is common to outsiders and scapegoats throughout history, like Joseph cast into the pit by his brothers or Harry Potter locked under the stairs by the Dursleys. All the while, the psychic imbalance is happening within the city and the country, and they’re displacing their shadow material unto the man. The collective’s harmony is achieved by banishing its shadow onto one figure then forgetting him. As Sylvia Brinton Perera writes:
It mirrors the pain of their never-belonging, of homelessness, of living in hiding. They feel seen when this is interpreted as a sense of living in hell or in the underworld all their life, for they have experienced no internal safety and no outer holding. It is paradoxically also the place of their eventual reunion with the hidden individual Self. (The Scapegoat Complex: Toward a Mythology of Shadow and Guilt, p. 26)
This man lived in hell not because of inner evil but because the surrounding communities exiled parts of their own shadow into him. He became the vessel for their unintegrated suffering. He’s a trash can.
In every place he tried to find belonging, he ended up in chains. He was physically strong, but the community’s response to his strength was fear. They tried to bind him. Over and over again, they attempted to tame what they could not understand. But their methods never worked. He always broke through the chains.
His chains were not just iron — they were the collective’s effort to reduce him, to control what they could not contain. In each place he went, he met a community that refused compassion. Instead, they responded with force. They treated him not as a man, but as something subhuman. He was turned into a beast, something to be managed, silenced, avoided. As Aldo Carotenuto writes:
When a person has directed a spotlight onto a single facet of our personality and succeeded in making us look like a monster, we feel intensely misunderstood. This is not all bad, for it forces us into isolation and directs us towards our essential task: self-knowledge. (Eros and Pathos: Shades of Love and Suffering, p. 98)
Carotenuto goes on to say, “This is the time when one is either crucified or declared mad.” These are not just historical outcomes, they are motifs. The scapegoat figure is either sacrificed or pathologized. He sets off a chain reaction wherever he goes: His presence destabilizes the collective by revealing what it cannot face in itself.
What began as exile became initiation. The misunderstood man is driven into solitude, not by choice but by the weight of projection. And it is precisely in this liminal space, among the tombs, outside the reach of social order, that he can meet God. Cast out by the world, he enters the underworld.
Jesus casts the demons out of the man but not into nowhere-ness. He sends them straight to a herd of pigs, a key cornerstone of the community’s social and economic life. This was no mere happenstance. Jesus frees the man and simultaneously judges those who sought to keep him in chains. At this, all hell breaks loose in the town.
This man’s personal deliverance and psychic release, his subsequent inner clarity triggers a public crisis. Word of the event spreads quickly. A mob forms, converging from both the city and the countryside. This man, we learn, is not a stranger; he is known to them. He has history. He belongs to both places, and yet he has been rejected by both.
When the mob arrives, they find him sitting with Jesus, clothed, and in his right mind. He is no longer fragmented. He is centered. He is on the path. But rather than celebrate, the community is afraid.
The real shock of the story is this: It is not his madness that terrifies the mob but his sanity. What exactly are they afraid of? The collective benefited from his madness. It served a purpose. His healing threatens the psychological architecture of the collective along with their economics. Without him they’re exposed, and they have to face themselves. The story ends the same way it began: with a man in his right mind and a community in disarray.
Perhaps it was his very wholeness, his refusal to conform that first drew the projections. Maybe he awakened it in them, like Joseph awakening envy in his brothers. He became the hook on which the collective hung its unconscious contents. Jung writes:
The collective attitude hinders the recognition and evaluation of a psychology different from the subject’s, because the mind that is collectively oriented is quite incapable of thinking and feeling in any other way than by projection. (Psychological Types, p. 10)
This is how the group preserves itself, by exiling what it cannot understand. The more unconscious material he was made to carry, the more monstrous he appeared. But now he is free. The projection has shattered. And what remains is the collective, suddenly visible for what it truly is: the possessed. This is a man who once thought for himself, and now, terrifyingly, he is thinking for himself again.
When the man first meets Jesus, he begs him not to torment him. He assumes that Jesus, like everyone else, has come to hurt him. He has been tormented enough. The collective tried to bind him. He has heard their accusations so often that they’ve become his inner monologue. The cycle: projection, isolation, internal collapse. Eventually, he lost touch with himself entirely. The guilt and shame projected onto him did not merely wound him, they warped his very mind. His identity dissolved beneath the weight of a collective shadow he was never meant to carry. It’s clear to see how a person could get like this. Aldo Carotenuto wrote:
Any man who thinks for himself and travels unbeaten paths provokes consternation and aggression, and becomes the target of abuse. In others he evokes desperate ghosts of ruin and transgression. In other words, his example bears witness to and inevitably signals the lack of soul in others. (The Vertical Labyrinth: Individuation in Jungian Psychology, p.61–62).
The demoniac does just that. The city and country had no soul, but he did. His very existence reveals the soul-sickness of the collective. And in response, they declare him mad. He is no longer a scapegoat but an individuated person. And that makes him dangerous.
Their shadow begins to show, and their response is swift. They expel the healer. They do to Jesus what they did to the Gadarene. If this is what one healed man reveals, what more might Jesus expose?
Jesus’ interaction is striking in its simplicity. He doesn’t do or say much. He doesn’t preach. He offers no moral instruction. There is nothing about conversion or discipleship. He simply asks the man his name. He meets him with compassion not condescension. He doesn’t mock the man or treat him as if he were beneath him. Perhaps, in empathy, Jesus recognizes someone familiar; someone like himself. Jesus, too, is accused of demon possession by crowds like this. Like the Gadarene, he unmasks the mob for what it is. And Jesus, too, will bear the same kind of scars.
And so, paradoxically, what seemed like madness becomes the threshold to meaning. As Carotenuto wrote, such suffering is “not all bad.” It forces you inward. It strips away illusion. It becomes the road to God and the gateway to self-knowledge. This is the pattern: the exile finds a home.
A compassionate encounter with a power greater than his chains liberated him. He wants to follow Jesus, to get on the boat, to leave the scene of so much pain. But Jesus sends him back. He is told to return home and speak of what he has experienced: the compassion, the restoration, the descent, and return. The homeless man in the tombs has now experienced a homecoming. He becomes, in the deepest sense, a wounded healer, bearing an unextinguishable light back into the places that once tried to destroy him.
Works Cited:
Carotenuto, A. (1985). The Vertical Labyrinth: Individuation in Jungian Psychology. Translated by John Shepley. Toronto: Inner City Books.
Carotenuto, A. (1989). Eros and Pathos: Shades of Love and Suffering. Toronto: Inner City Books.
Jung, C. G. (1957/1970). The Undiscovered Self (Present and Future). In Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 10: Civilization in Transition (R. F. C. Hull, Trans., 2nd ed., pp. 267–331). Princeton University Press.
Jung, C. G. (1971). Psychological Types. Translated by H. G. Baynes, revised by R. F. C. Hull. Princeton University Press.
Perera, S. B. (1986). The Scapegoat Complex: Toward a Mythology of Shadow and Guilt. Toronto: Inner City Books.
