THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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fantasies and splitting defences predominate, however, the developmental task of ego
integration will be disrupted, resulting in the persistent experience of fantastically
distorted internal and - via projective mechanisms - external objects:
The fear of phantastically 'bad' persecutors and the belief in 'phantastically'
good objects are bound up with each other. Idealization is an essential
process in the young child's mind, since he cannot yet cope in any other way
with his fears of persecution (a result of his own hatred). Not until early
anxieties have been sufficiently relieved owing to experiences which increase
love and trust, is it possible to establish the all-important process of bringing
together more closely the various aspects of objects (external, internal, 'good'
and 'bad', loved and hated), and thus for hatred to become actually mitigated
by love - which means a decrease of ambivalence. While the separation of
these contrasting aspects - felt in the unconscious as contrasting objects ­
operates strongly, feelings of hatred and love are also so much divorced from
each other that love cannot mitigate hatred (Klein, 1940, p. 349).
The last general point to be made about internal objects concerns their relationship with
the actual external parental figures. In Klein's work, the external parental figures and
internal objects exert a mutual influence on each other (Klein, 1952a,b). Klein thus
acknowledges that the actual attitudes and behaviour of the parents can influence the
child's internal object world, while nonetheless emphasising how instinctual fantasy
distorts the child's realistic perception ofhislher parents:
At every step, persecutory and depressive anxieties may be reduced, or, for
that matter, increased, by the mother's attitude; and the extent to which
helpful or persecutory figures will prevail in the infant's unconscious is
strongly influenced by his actual experiences, primarily with his mother, but
also soon with the father and other members of the family (Klein, 1952b, p.
98).
8.4 Therelationship between the ego and internal objects
The fluid and ambiguous relationship between internal objects and the ego (or self) is
important in Kleinian theory. On the one hand, the ego relates to the internal object as
distinct and separate from itself but, on the other, this differentiation dissolves, and the
internal object is perceived to combine aspects of both self and object. This is