THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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ritual element in both obsessional neurosis and religious worship, however, is transparent
to classical psychoanalysis. With reference to the obsessional neurotic, lones (1951 b)
notes: "His psychology is based on repressed hatred of his father, with a consequent fear
of retaliatory punishment, and his rituals symbolise acts of appeasement or restitution
only" (p. 199). In the religious individual, this retaliation is not simply loss of God's
love, but damnation and torture in the province of hell. What sin, asks lones, could ever
be commensurate with such cruel treatment: "The tortures and damnation emanate from
the infant's lively and unrestrained sadistic phantasies and are of the same nature as his
own hostile wishes against his father for which the punishments are (projected)
retaliations" (p.204).
Religion thus provides a stylised way of dealing with perennial neurotic conflicts. As
Meissner (1984) notes, Freud distorts the analogy between religion and neurosis into an
identity. That religion may be anything other than a defensive strategy for managing
neurotic anxiety is automatically ruled out by Freud (Meissner 1984; Pruyser, 1973).
Freud has been criticised for proposing a pathological model of spirituality, in which all
religion is construed as the regressive attempt to meet infantile needs. However,
Meissner (1984) notes that the strict analogy between religion and obsessional neurosis
which Freud pursued is not uncommon in religious people, "in whom blind adherence to
ritual and scrupulous conscientiousness, as well as conscience, dominate religious life. In
fact ... the great mass ofbelievers lend credence to Freud's formulations" (p. 15).
At this point, we may summarise Freud's general psychological theory ofreligion. God is
a mental creation, and therefore has a solely psychological - as opposed to supernatural ­
existence. Freud thereby effectively reduces religion to psychology, a psychology which
embraces both the history of the individual and of collective humanity. Religious belief
is rooted in the protracted reality of infantile vulnerability and the unconscious defensive
strategies adopted to avoid the anxiety associated with this vulnerability. God is thus an
intrapsychic entity, unconsciously evoked to ameliorate the uncomfortable reality of a
necessary suffering intrinsic to the human condition. Individuals' experience of God