THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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simply a form ofhysteria. He appears never to have developed this notion, but it suggests
itselfas an extension ofhis 1885 statement that, through suggestion,
an idea, a coherent group of associated ideas settle themselves in the mind in
the fashion of parasites, remaining isolated from the rest of the mind and
expressing themselves outwardly through corresponding motor phenomena ....
The group of suggested ideas finds itself isolated and cut off from the control
of that larger collection of personal ideas ... which constitutes consciousness
proper, that is the Ego (Cited in Ellenberger, 1970, p. 149).
He linked this conception to psychopathology by claiming that symptoms relate to the
exclusion of ideas from personal consciousness: "The idea, like a virus, develops in a
corner of the personality inaccessible to the subject, works subconsciously, and brings
about all disorders ofhysteria and mental disease" (Charcot cited in Ellenberger, 1970, p.
149). The Devil was somehow an expression of such isolated 'ideas', experienced as a
separate entity by virtue of its alienation from the central ego.
It was Pierre lanet (1859-1947), one of Charcot's neurological successors, who
documented his own 1890 hypnotic cure of a man possessed by the Devil,4 and provided
a more specific psychogenic explanation for possession. Janet's conclusion anticipates
Freud's later formulations ofthe unconscious:
Man, all too proud, figures that he is the master of his movements, his words,
his ideas and himself. It is perhaps of ourselves that we have the least
command. There are crowds of things which operate within ourselves
without our will (Cited in Ellenberger, 1970, p. 370).
4 The patient in question was extremely agitated, self-destructive, and blasphemous, and the Devil's voice,
alternating with his own, spoke through him (ElIenberger, 1970, p. 369). After hypnotising him, Janet
discovered that the patient had been unfaithful to his wife on a business trip and, after dreaming ofthe
Devil, found himself possessed. Janet was convinced that guilt, rather than possession was the cause ofthe
symptoms, and that the Devil was simply a superstitious manifestation ofhis own self-disgust. After Janet
assured the hypnotised patient that his wife had forgiven him the delusion ofpossession disappeared.