THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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counterpoised by a de-integrative tendency to fragment experience. As a consequence,
many thoughts and feelings are experienced, not as creations ofthe ego, but as forces and
alien internal entities (Ogden, 1994). This conception of an internal world populated by
multiple personified, semi-autonomous objects, interacting with the ego in complex
patterns of association and dissociation, provides a valuable perspective from which to
understand satanic cult experience.
8.2 Internal objects and their origin
The concept of the internal object refers to an unconscious experience or fantasy of "a
concrete object physically located internal to the ego (body) which has its own motives
and intentions towards the ego and to other objects. It exists within the ego, and in a
greater or lesser extent of identification with the ego" (Hinshelwood, 1991, p. 68). In her
psychoanalysis of young children, Klein observed that they not only fantasised about the
inside of their mothers' bodies, but also about the contents of their own insides. The
symbolic play of her young patients indicated that they perceived the inside of their
bodies to be populated in an animistic fashion by body parts (breasts, penises), substances
(urine, faeces, food), and animal or human figures. Klein argued that these fantasies
derived from the interplay between a priori images of the external world, inherent in the
instinctual drives (libidinal and destructive) themselves, and the actual objects
encountered by the infant. Klein based this notion of a priori images on Freud's
contention, discussed previously in relation to the paternal imago, that all human beings
are endowed at birth with a phylogenetic inheritance of specific memory traces and
images. Klein's use ofthis notion was more extensive and systematic, and she suggests a
set of universal mental mechanisms comprising images and fantasised activities relating
to bodily contents and processes which mediate the infant's interactions with the object
world. Fantasy, the psychic expression of instincts and the primary content of
unconscious mental processes, refers, in Kleinian thought, to imaginary interactions
between individuals and their objects, involving both instinctual wish-fulfilment and
defences against anxiety elicited by these interactions (Isaacs, 1952). The central thesis