THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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attain a level of interpretation that is "neither universal nor particular but general"
(Svensson, 1986, p. 32). The, aim therefore, was to formulate a level of psychological
interpretation that offers a plausible account of the meanings of satanic involvement for
all ofthe subjects. This process involved two subphases:
a. Descriptive-phenomenological phase
After repeatedly reading through the transcribed protocols in order to get a holistic sense
of each subject's experience of satanic involvement, natural meaning units were
discriminated in the order that they arose in the interview protocols. Natural meaning
units may be defined as statements expressing single, delimited aspects of the subjects'
experiences in the subjects' wording (Stones, 1988). These were numbered, reduced and
transformed in a column alongside the original text into descriptive psychological
statements expressing the essential implicit or explicit meaning of the delimited aspects
of experience. The transcribed interviews appear in italics in the left hand column (See
appendix). The purpose of this subphase was to organise the raw interview data into a
more manageable form, prior to analysing it from the chosen interpretive perspective.
b. Hermeneutic phase
Until this point, the data analysis was explicitly descriptive, i.e., the researcher
consciously bracketed presuppositions and hypotheses, adhered to the subjects'
consciously intended meanings, and articulated their experience m language that
deliberately avoided theoretical terminology. The second phase, however, was explicitly
hermeneutic, in that the essential meanings identified were interpreted, where possible, in
terms of an object relations theoretical framework. The theoretical framework employed
derived from the work of Kernberg (1976) and Ogden (1990). Kernberg's object
relations model was selected for two reasons: (I) It goes beyond the Kleinian conception
ofobjects as free floating object images in the psychic apparatus, by clarifying their status
as complex internal structures, or "psychic precipitates", manifest in primitive form as
alternating contradictory "ego states" involving affect, ideational content, subjective and
behavioural manifestations; (2) It provides a clear and systematic outline ofthe structural