THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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split-off negative self representation arising from S's actual experiences with his parents, in
which he perceived himself to be unloved, rejected, and inferior. S's negative parental
experiences, and his internal world of polarised part-objects, manifest as supernatural
figures, therefore inclined him to interpret his experiences along supernatural lines before
his actual encounter with Satanism. S's parents, preoccupied with their own marital
difficulties (39), were unable to understand and contain his occult experience, and thus to
make it assimilable to him as a natural, rather than a supernatural, mental event.
A further predisposing factor was his alleged introduction to frightening occult ritual
activity by his grandmother, shortly after his possession experience at the age of four
(15,51,52). Before he was old enough to comprehend the significance ofthe rituals, or to
choose to become involved, he was thrust into a world ofbizarre events, and recalls being
injected with something during a ritual (52). What in reality transpired is impossible to
ascertain, but S clearly believed himself to have been intrusively penetrated by a substance
that gave adult ritual participants control over him.
Yet another predisposing factor was his belief, allegedly instilled by his grandmother upon
introducing him to an unknown woman, that this woman was his true biological mother,
and that she was mysteriously associated with the ritual events he had experienced
(51,53,54). S' s childhood perception that the secret of his origins lay in his "real"
mother's association with the occult, would understandably have drawn him to Satanism.
S was later to construct an elaborate explanation ofhis conception as part ofa mysterious
satanic breeding programme, in which he was secretly switched at birth and assigned to
another infant's mother (46,47,48). This fantasy is meaningful in the light of S's
experience of rejection by his mother, who later confirmed his impressions of rejection by
confessing that she had not wanted to fall pregnant (33). S, aided by his grandmother's
suggestions, appears to have coped with his experience ofnot being loved and wanted by
his mother, through his belief that he was a changeling, that his conception was a special
event, and that he could be united with his exotic and mysterious "real" mother.
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