THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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satanic ritual participants. As noted in Chapter Four, the typical history ofmany Satanists
includes a disrupted family background, with a high prevalence of parental emotional
withdrawal and, very often, parental verbal or physical abuse. Fairbairn's work,
discussed in Chapter Nine, focused on the psychic consequences of internalising bad
parental objects. It was noted that one of the defensive strategies that may be employed
to manage bad internal objects, in the absence of good object experience, is to deliver
oneself over to the bad object and unconsciously identify with it:
Since the joy ofloving seems hopelessly barred to him, he may as well deliver
himself over to the joy of hating and obtain what satisfaction he can out of
that. He thus makes a pact with the Devil and says, "Evil be thou my good"
.... It becomes a case, not only of "Evil be thou my good", but also of "Good
be thou my evil". This is a reversal of values, it must be added, which is
rarely consciously accepted (Fairbairn, 1940, p. 27).
According to Fairbairn, enslavement to, and identification with bad objects, horrifying as
it may be, is preferable to the sense of abandonment and desolation that would ensue if
the individual lacking good object relations sacrificed the bad ones as well. The demonic
pact to which Fairbairn refers is a metaphorical one, used to describe the schizoid
individual's internal world. The metaphor, however, is directly relevant to the puzzling
reality of satanic participants' identification with evil. The absence of internal goodness
makes identification with bad objects - and the supreme evil object (Satan) - the only way
of establishing object relatedness. By reversing the polarities of good and evil, this
identification becomes easier to accept.
Addiction to bad objects has also attracted the attention of contemporary Kleinian
authors. Meltzer (1988) describes a state of addiction to a bad part of the self which,
although dreaded, cannot be given up: