THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

119
melancholia" and the Devil had promised to help him and give him support. Freud's
interpretation ofthe motive for the pact is that Haizmann, mourning the loss ofhis father,
wished to have the Devil as a paternal surrogate for nine years, after which time he would
become the Devil's property, "body and soul". This, however, does not explain why the
Devil, rather than God, should suggest himself as the substitute father. Freud addresses
this by arguing that the idealised father of early childhood is the origin of the adult's
experience of God: "The ideational image belonging to his childhood is preserved and
becomes merged with the inherited memory-traces of the primal father to form the
individual's idea of God" (Freud, 1923, p. 85). However, the ambivalence that every
child feels toward his father, manifest in the coexistence of affectionate and submissive
impulses, on the one hand, and hostile and defiant ones on the other, is consequently also
experienced in relation to God. The Devil, too, has his psychological origin in this
childhood ambivalence, manifest as the incarnate expression of the hated and feared
paternal imago. Since God is modelled on the father, the Old Testament God is endowed
with both good and evil qualities. Like ordinary humans, theologians struggled to
reconcile God's contradictory aspects, and so separated good from bad in order to create
an evil counterpart to God:
The contradictions in the original nature of God are, however, a reflection of
the ambivalence which governs the relation of the individual to his personal
father. If the benevolent and righteous God is a substitute for his father, it is
not to be wondered at tHat his hostile attitude to his father, too, which is one
ofhating and fearing him ... should have come to expression in the creation of
I
Satan (Freud, 1923, p. 21).
I
Originally, in terms of Christian mythology as well as in individual development, the
loved and hated father, expressed symbolically as God and the Devil, were one and the
same.
By splitting an ambivalent paternal figure into two contradictory deities, humans
are spared the anxiety of loving a cruel and vengeful father, and hating a father who is at
times a benevolent protector: