THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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of Klein's object relations theory is that the infant fantasises about orally incorporating
his parents and, having done so:
feels them to be live people inside his body in the concrete way in which deep
unconscious phantasies are experienced - they are, in his mind, 'internal' or
'inner' objects ... Thus an inner world is being built up in the child's
unconscious mind, corresponding to his actual experiences and the
impressions he gains from people and the external world. and yet altered by
his own phantasies and impulses" (Klein, 1940, p. 345).
Oral incorporation or introjection of the mother's breast is the means by which an
external object becomes internalised. Introjection is the mental representation of the oral
instinctual impulse, a process which both facilitates ego development and functions as a
defence whereby the good object is internally secured to combat anxiety concerning
persecutory bad objects. The developmental importance ofthe internalised good object is
that it "comes to form the core of the ego around which it expands and develops" (Klein,
1958. p. 239). Introjection locates good objects inside and this process promotes the
ensuing experience of an "internal sense of goodness, or self-confidence and mental
stability" (Hinshelwood; 1991, p. 333).
8.3 Types of internal objects
The nature and characteristics of internal objects in no way corresponds directly to the
actual characteristics and attitudes of the external objects. This is largely because the
nature of internal objects is dictated by the vicissitudes of libidinal and destructive
instincts, and the defence mechanisms which arise to manage anxiety associated with
instinctually-based fantasies. Klein assumes the reality of Freud's dual instinct model
and contends that, from birth, the death instinct is partly deflected outwards onto the
infant's first external object, the maternal breast, in the form of oral-sadistic aggression in
order to protect the infant against the primal anxiety of annihilation from within (Klein,
1946). This defensive strategy, however, turns the external object into a persecutory
figure in the infant's fantasies. Introjection of the persecutory or bad objects means that
the infant experiences paranoid anxiety in response to the fantasy of being attacked
internally by the persecutory introject.