THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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both neurosis and religion have their origins. The oedipal son's love for his god-like
father is counterbalanced by his unconscious patricidal wishes, accompanying guilt, and
anxiety concerning paternal retribution. Society demands the renunciation of these
oedipal wishes, and the child's dependency on the father in the context of these oedipal
wishes induces a powerful ambivalence toward the latter. The loved benevolent paternal
protector becomes a rival for the mother's love, and threatens - in the child's fantasies l ­
retribution for the child's parricidal and incestuous wishes. The question now arises as to
how an invisible deity comes to represent the mortal father. The answer, provided in the
following section, lies in the mental processes whereby the child attempts to resolve the
conflict thrust upon him by his ambivalent emotional attitude towards his father.
7.1.3 The superego as intrapsychic nucleus for the image of God
The oedipal conflict becomes partially resolved when the child, out of fear, renounces his
incestuous longing for his mother and identifies with the father. Out ofthis identification
emerges the structure of the superego, representing the internalised prohibitions of the
father:
A portion of the external world has, at least partially, been abandoned as an
object and has instead, by identification, been taken into the ego and thus
become an integral part of the internal world. This new psychical agency
continues to carry on the functions which have hitherto been performed by the
people (the abandoned objects) in the external world: it observes the ego,
gives it orders, judges it and threatens it with punishments, exactly like the
parents whose place it has taken. We call this agency the super-ego and are
aware ofit and its judicial functions as our conscience (Freud, 1938, p. 205)
The superego, in both its supportive and punitive aspects, results from identification with
parents experienced ambivalently as both loving and threatening. The process of
identification re-establishes these parental qualities as an intrapsychic structure. Obedient
I In psychoanalytic discourse the tenn fantasy is typically spelt phantasy to distinguish its unconscious
nature from conscious fantasy or day-dreaming. Jung and his followers, however, use the tenn fantasy to
embrace both conscious and unconscious imaginative mental activity. For the sake of consistency the tenn
fantasy will be used in this dissertation to describe both conscious fantasy and the unconscious mental
processes from which it is believed to derive.