THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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The nature of the endopsychic structures arising from internalisation of bad objects
requires some elaboration. The undivided original ego is constituted in relation to the
undivided original object (the mother). Frustration of the child's dependency needs
results in the original object being ambivalently experienced as simultaneously exciting
and rejecting, and thus both desired and hated. The child's helpless reliance on an object
experienced as frustrating, is intolerable. The whole object is internalised in order to
banish the ambivalent quality of the relationship and to minimise the risk of rejection and
disappointment. This strategy displaces the painfully conflictual relationship with the
object from the external world to the internal world. This allows the child a more
tolerable conscious perception of the external object, while resurrecting its overlyexciting
and rejecting features intrapsychically.
The next defensive step is to cope with this threatening whole internalised object, which
is then split into exciting and rejecting part-object components. The exciting object is the
alluring, seductive component of the bad internalised object, whereas the rejecting object
is the withholding or persecutory component. In order to protect him/herself against the
internal badness that arises from identification with the bad object, the young child splits
off portions of its ego associated with the frustrating aspects (exciting and rejecting) of
the internalised bad object. What ensues is an intrapsychic situation characterised by two
part-object relationships, comprising split-off portions of ego in relation with the exciting
and rejecting objects. Dreams, fantasies, and behaviour are thus essentially
"dramatizations of endopsychic situations involving both (a) relationships between egostructures
and internalized objects, and (b) inter-relationships between ego structures
themselves" (Fairbairn, 1951, p. 170). The part of the ego associated with the exciting
object is termed the libidinal ego, while the part associated with the rejecting object is
termed the antilibidinal ego. Fairbairn (1944; 1951) refers to this aggressive, persecutory
structure as the "internal saboteur", since it aggressively attacks the exciting object and
the libidinal ego associated with it. These two subsidiary egos with their associated
objects are repressed in order to defend against the distressing emotions accompanying
them. The agent of this repression is the central ego, the residue of the undivided ego.