THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

200
fundamentalist Christians alike commonly refer to "the demon of lust" and "the demon
of anger", etc. Here, instinctual impulses are clearly personified and identified as
external agents, even though they arise from one's own projected bodily states. This
indicates the lack of a "symbolic attitude" which permits the realisation that our
personifications are metaphorical, rather than literal (Samuels, 1985). The symbolic
attitude gives us the freedom to integrate - at least partially - our subpersonalities. The
opposing "literal" attitude means that subpersonalities are concretely experienced as
intrusive alien presences which require constant defensive externalisation: "When a
subpersonality is experienced as concretely not-I, whether internally as sensation or
externally as hallucination or deity, the ego-integrative, symbolic attitude is not yet
present in mature form" (Redfearn, 1994, p. 302).
11.8 Complexes, subpersonalities, and psychopathology
Whereas Freud related psychological disorder to the mechanism of instinctual
repression, Jung saw dissociation as the heart of psychopathology. Dissociation, in
this sense, refers to the splitting apart ofunresolved opposite psychic sub-personalities,
based on complexes with contrasting tendencies. Jung writes with conviction that:
"Today the hypothesis that complexes are fragmentary psyches that have been cut off
from the whole can indeed be regarded as assured" (1948b, p. 98). Consequently,
psychological diagnosis involves the diagnosis of complexes. Complexes comprise
both impersonal (archetypal) and personal elements. The archetypal configuration of
the complex is universal and transhistorical, while the personal aspect derives from the
unique aspects of individual history, particularly early childhood. The aetiology of
complexes is "frequently a so-called trauma, an emotional shock or some such thing,
that splits off a bit of the psyche" (lung, 1948b, p. 98). The degree of psychological
disturbance is determined by two factors: firstly, the affective intensity of the complex
and, secondly, the stance of the ego in relation to the complex, which in turn
determines the extent to which the complex becomes dissociated from the rest of the
psyche. The following subtypes of psychic disturbance, based on Jacobi (1959), may
thus be differentiated: