THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

166
While the perception of objects as bad may partly result from destructive projections, the
realistic attitudes and behaviour of parental figures toward their children strongly
influence the quality ofthe children's introjects. Introjection, as discussed in the previous
chapter, refers to the fantasised process whereby significant external others are
internalised and unconsciously experienced as residing within oneself as dynamic subpersonalities,
significantly influencing thought, feeling and perception. These objects,
which once wielded power over the child in the external world, now retain the capacity to
do so as enduring structures in the child's internal world.
Young children employ the defence mechanism of splitting to actively dissociate good
from bad object experience, and the bad objects are present in the child's fantasies as
grossly distorted persecutory parental imagos - ogres, witches, evil magicians, monsters,
demons etc. (Klein 1929, 1930, 1933, 1935). Klein (1933) notes that:
from my own analytic observations ... the real objects behind those
imaginary, terrifying figures are the child's own parents, and that those
dreadful shapes in some way or other reflect the features of its father and
mother, however distorted and phantastic the resemblance may be (p. 249).
Klein's and Fairbairn's contribution to psychoanalysis was to show how these split good
and bad object relations are internalised, thereby becoming part of the individual's own
psyche. It can thus be argued that the psychogenic origin of demons and the Devil lies in
the defensive projection. of bad parental introjects, subsequently experienced as
personified malevolent entities.
Although the Devil is typically identified as male, we
need not necessarily conclude that the figure of Satan is automatically based solely on a
paternal object. Object relations theory has traditionally focused on pathological aspects
\
of the mother-child dyad.
However, both Klein and Fairbairn accepted that experiences
in relation to mother are frequently displaced onto father, and introjects thus frequently
carry traces ofboth parental objects.
Splitting defences coincide with the integrative tendencies of the ego to draw together
polarised selfand object representations. As was noted in the previous chapter, the young