THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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child is confronted with the realisation that the good and bad part-objects are one
composite object; that the parent who is hated is simultaneously the parent who is loved.
The realisation that hatred has been directed toward the loved object is of consequence
because, at this stage, "the belief in the omnipotence of evil outweighs the belief in the
power of love" (Heimann, 1955, p. 25).
If children feel that their reparative fantasies of healing and restoring the good objects,
which are unwittingly harmed in fantasised attacks on the persecutory bad objects, are
successful, then integration of the split good and bad components occurs, leading to
integrated personality functioning. The sense that goodness (both internal and external) is
stronger than evil means that supernatural personifications of destructiveness are no
longer as powerful, although such good and bad supernatural entities may continue to
exist for the child, particularly when reinforced by dualistic religious mythologies. If,
however, children are excessively aggressive or the parental objects are in reality
excessively punitive, then the integration of good and bad part-objects cannot occur for
fear the bad is stronger than the good and will destroy it. Splitting, manifest as polarised
experiences of self and other as absolutely good or bad, persists into adolescence and
adulthood, with accompanying aggressive and paranoid fantasies structuring the
individual's interaction with the world. Other primitive defences usually accompany
splitting. Hence, notes Olsson (1983), "in adolescents with severe problems expressed in
terms of the supernatural, we find preponderance of denial, projection, projective
identification, paranoid-persecutory ideation and pervasive splitting mechanisms" (p.
248).
Good internal objects foster psychic integration and an internal sense of well-being, but
bad internal objects elicit paranoid anxiety centred around fantasies ofbeing harmed from
within. Because internal object relations comprise both object representations and self
representation, children who internalise bad objects experience themselves as bad. This
experience of internal badness is extremely anxiety-provoking and they unconsciously
manage the paranoid anxiety using two defensive strategies. Firstly, the bad self