THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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reinforce one extreme of the bipolar archetypal structure, resulting in the child
internalising an archetypal object experienced as bad and persecutory. Destructive
aspects of the self become identified and fused with archetypal parental imagos, and the
resulting composite psychic organisation is defensively split-off or dissociated from the
ego, where it exists as a relatively independent subpersonality. The alien (egodystonic)
quality of this subpersonality and its mmeutralised destructive energy makes it too
threatening to be assimilated. Instead, it is projected in fantasy and assumes an external
existence as a malevolent, alien, supernatural entity. The projected demonic
subpersonality will take its imagery and meaning from culturally specific mythological
motifs. In Western culture, the subpersonality will be identified with the Judeo-Christian
mythological figures of Satan and his demons.
Human development or individuation proceeds through a dialectical process of
dissociation and integration, and it is when the ego is too rigid and brittle to accommodate
its projective identifications, manifest as demonic subpersonalities, that possession
becomes an imminent possibility. When this developmental scenario occurs in a
religious culture that polarises good and bad into theological absolutes, and attributes all
that is bad to the malevolent intentions of an unambiguously evil deity (Satan), the
psychological and cultural prerequisites for satanic possession conjoin. What we witness
in both Christian fundamentalism and involuntary demonic possession is a defensive
strategy whereby good and bad are split and, in fantasy, located outside the individual in
the figures of God and Satan. Good is fanatically clung to, while all that is bad (the
destructive subpersonality) is projected onto Satan, an ever-threatening figure who
contaminates, corrupts, and destroys good wherever he finds it. All activities and
impulses symbolically associated with Satan - decadence, indulgence, instinctual
gratification, etc. - are avoided, and the world is anxiously scanned for signs of Satan's
influence (rock music, drugs, 'deviant' sexuality, fantasy games, mass media, etc.). The
more the bad aspects are extruded, the more threatening the ever-present possibility of
their intrusion becomes. Involuntary possession represents the subjective experience of a
violent intrusion by the demonic subpersonality, and its temporary usurpation of