THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

The custom is to speak of introjects as if they were angels and demons with
minds and powers oftheir own ... In these instances we forget that an introject
can only be a fantasy ... We forget then that the introject can have no powers
or motives of its own, and no perceptual and judgmental functions, except as,
like a dream figure, it has these properties archaically ascribed to it by the
imagining subject (p. 422).
However, what is lost in Schafer's critique is the phenomenological reality of people's
subjective experience of their objects as precisely personified, autonomous foreign
inhabitants of their internal world, acting upon them irrespective of their conscious will
and intentions.
In contrast to Schafer, Ogden (1990) privileges the experiential realm
when he defines internal objects as:
dynamically unconscious suborganizations of the ego capable of generating
meaning and experience, i.e., capable of thought, feeling, and perception.
These suborganizations stand in unconscious relationships to one another and
include (1) self-suborganizations of ego, i.e., aspects ... in which the person
more fully experiences his ideas and feelings as his own, and (2) object
suborganizations of ego, through which meanings are generated on a mode
based upon an identification ... with the object. This identification with the
object is so thorough that one's original sense of self is almost entirely lost (p.
132).
As noted earlier, in Fairbairn's critique of Klein introjects are not simply fantasies, but
structures, i.e. enduring and functional internal organisation of the self. The extent of the
introject's independence in relation to the self, however, is variable. Introjects may be
integrated into the self structure in different degrees, i.e., on a continuum ranging from
unintegration, where they are experienced as alien entities, to relative integration, where
they lose their independent quality and become merged with the subject's sense of self.
In the case of the former, the introjective organisation may be experienced as "another
force or focus of influence in our experience of ourselves, which may stand as separate
and even in opposition to our own experience of personal intention or will" (Meissner
1981,p.49).4
4 Meissner considers introjective configurations to have an intermediate status between objective
representations deriving from perceptions of the external object realm, and the subjective internal core of