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The Scottish psychoanalyst Ronald Fairbairn put it in 1952 this way: it is better to be a sinner in a world ruled by God than to live in a world ruled by the devil. A child who faces that choice takes the blame and becomes the sinner, which preserves the illusion that the world is fundamentally good.
The arrangement works because blame carries hope. If everything happens because of you, then everything also depends on you, and fixing yourself and your actions can repair things. Psychoanalysts call this an omnipotent defense: the child believes they hold so much power that they cause whatever goes wrong, and the belief brings a sense of control and safety.
Psychoanalysts call the pattern a moral defense. It does not need a failing parent. Childhood is complicated, and things happen in every family.
Why would mistreated children blame themselves?
Ronald Fairbairn was a Scottish psychoanalyst who helped develop object relations theory, which holds that people are driven by the need for relationships more than by instinct. His work with children who had been mistreated at home showed him that they clung to their parents and blamed themselves instead. He called this the moral defense, in which the child takes the badness of the parent inside. Fairbairn spent most of his career in Edinburgh.
Why does feeling in control comfort people so much?
In 1975 the psychologist Ellen Langer ran a lottery study on what she called the illusion of control. People who had picked their own ticket demanded far more money to sell it than people who were handed a random ticket. The odds were identical for both groups. Langer published the work in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
Why does a fair world feel safer to believe in?
Social psychologist Melvin Lerner studied this as the just-world hypothesis in the 1960s. In a 1966 experiment with Carolyn Simmons, volunteers watched a woman who seemed to receive painful electric shocks during a memory task. When the volunteers could not stop the shocks, they rated her more negatively. Lerner took this as evidence that people devalue victims to protect the belief that outcomes are deserved.
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