THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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aggravated by the children's hostile projections. Their frequent manifestation as ugly
composite figures of quasi-human and animalistic/reptilian characteristics, filled with hate
and malice, indicates the embodiment of the most primitive self and object fantasies.
These anxiety-provoking bad self/object representations are defensively split off and
externalised in fantasy, thereby attaining a life of their own as supernatural entities. On
becoming members of satanic covens, neophytes are exposed to an ideology which
celebrates hatred and destructiveness, teaches that demons are spiritual realities, and
provides a mythical-ritual structure for the ego-syntonic re-internalisation of the split-off
ego aspects. Subjects' pre-satanic identification with the destructive subpersonality
facilitates this re-introjection, which would otherwise elicit extreme persecutory anxiety.
Having re-internalised their "demons", subjects are gratified by the belief that they can
command the supernatural powers of their possessing inhabitants, powers which express
their own omnipotent destructive fantasies.
The relationship between demons and Satan is a hierarchical one. Satan, too, is a demon,
but he is the supreme demonic authority who commands subordinate demons in the same
way that God is believed to command His angels. Subjects one, two, three, and five claim
to have seen Satan. While the detail of their respective descriptions differed to some
extent, all of the subjects witnessed Satan materialise as a tall, silent, attractive, refined,
Caucasian male figure, with an immensely powerful presence. Upon seeing him
materialise, subjects felt a mixture of terror, awe, and respect. Satan's appearance, and
subjects' experience of him as a supernatural father, indicates his status as a hallucinatory
manifestation of a projected, omnipotent, paternal object representation. Initially, Satan is
idealised as the omnipotent paternal part-object, who gives his satanic "children" power,
acceptance, instinctual gratification and security. Unlike God, who symbolises the hostile,
critical, and rejecting bad paternal part-object, Satan is believed to welcome all those
social misfits who previously experienced themselves as despised and rejected.
Moreover, Satan celebrates the aggressive, destructive, and sexual aspects of people that
are harshly judged and condemned by Christian ideologies and authority figures in the
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