THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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conscience and guilt in the respective models, also does not present too great a difficulty.
Jung, contra Freud, believed that humans have an innate moral sense or conscience
(Samuels,1985). Klein (1935), too, in her theory ofthe reparative impulse, believed that
inherent destructive tendencies are countered by equally innate tendencies to experience
guilt for harming one's good objects, and the desire to repair the damage effected by
one's destructive fantasies.
The question of ego defences against anxiety, crucial to object relations theory, was
ignored by Jung, largely because he failed to appreciate the importance of anxiety in
psychic life. Contemporary Jungians, however, appear to have no qualms about drawing
on object relations theory in this regard: "Analytical psychology benefits from
psychoanalytic classifications of anxiety; for example, persecutory and depressive
anxiety, or anxiety resulting from super-ego activity" (Samuels, 1985, p. 67).
It may be thus argued that many key Jungian and object relations concepts are analogous.
compatible or, at times, even equivalent: archetype and unconscious fantasy, autonomous
complex and internal object, participation mystique and projective identification,
dissociation and splitting, self and ego. Furthermore, both Jungians and object relations
theorists consider normal psychic development to be a dialectical process involving
dissociation and integration, with the relative reconciliation and integration of polarised
psychic aspects being a criterion of mental health. In addition, both schools consider
psychopathology to be a consequence of excessive dissociation and projection of those
negatively perceived self aspects onto the external world, where they assume a
malevolent independent existence, and threaten the ego from without. Both schools
understand the Devil to be a manifestation of these violently dissociated and projected
self aspects, and both see this process of pathogenesis arising from the interplay of
universal innate predisposition and individual history. The remainder of the chapter will
be devoted to the formulation of a concise archetypal object relations model of voluntary
and involuntary demonic possession.