THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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understandings, to the extent that they are shared by a community of interpreters,
establishes the discursive common ground for agreement as to what a phenomenon might
mean. Thus, although Satanism resists most people's practical understanding, the Judaeo­
Christian spiritual heritage in the West, with its dualistic personification of supernatural
good and evil, provides a set of pre-understandings which makes satanic worship at least
vaguely comprehensible. Interpretation, therefore, consists of a hermeneutic circle
whereby our pre-understandings are challenged, refined, and modified into transformed
understandings. Interpretation, in other words, is not simply the restatement of our
preconceptions (Packer, 1989). The circle consists of forward and backward arcs, where
the forward arc comprises the projected pre-understandings of a phenomenon, and the
backward arc comprises new, modified understandings, which challenge the original preunderstandings
(Packer & Addison, 1989).
There are, of course, multiple discourses and multiple interpretive communities, and hence
any interpretation may be contested by someone located within another 'sense-making'
discursive vantage point. Within a fundamentalist Christian discourse, Satan is a real
supernatural intelligence who possesses the unwary; from a constructionist perspective,
Satan is an ideological construct whose imaginary existence serves a cohesive sociological
function in times of secular social change; and, within a psychoanalytic discourse, Satan is
a split-off part of the individual's own instinctual life or internal world. One cannot ask
which of these interpretations is the correct one, because each proceeds from a
fundamentally different discursive fore-structure of interpretive assumptions: "To
understand another depends on knowing what is meant by certain actions, and the
determination ofmeaning depends on one's interpretive strategy" (Gergen, 1989, p. 256).
13.2 Object relations and hermeneutic inquiry
The interpretive framework for this research is that of object relations theory, i.e. a
psychoanalytic developmental account ofhow early interpersonal relations with significant
others are internalised in fantasy, and transformed by unconscious mental processes into
dynamic personality structures, which influence experience and behaviour. The literature