THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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his family. These interpersonal losses serve to connect Satanists with the split-off libidinal
parts of their personalities, which value loving connection with others, and which grieve
the loss of relationship with loved objects. These losses result in loneliness, emptiness,
grief, guilt, rejection and despair, feelings from which the cult ideology and individuals'
psychic defences had previously protected them.
Fifth, for subjects five and six, the emergence of loving feelings for another person were
responsible for further alienating these individuals from the cult. Falling in love is not
possible without the activation of the split-off libidinal parts of the personality, which
Satanism systematically attempts to destroy in its members. Falling in love while
belonging to a cult based on destructiveness and hatred, ruptures the identification with
the destructive subpersonality, thereby undercutting the individual's commitment to the
cult and rendering the destructive subpersonality ego-dystonic.
Lastly, as a consequence of subjects' wavering commitment to Satanism, and failure to
completely identify with the destructive subpersonality, their relationship with Satan, the
mythical projection of the destructive subpersonality, undergoes a radical transformation.
The part object relationship in which subjects perceive themselves to be the devoted
children of Satan is obviously contingent upon splitting and idealising defences. Subjects
believe that by merely entertaining the wish to leave the cult the omniscient Satan knows
of their intentions. This activates paranoid fantasies of the split-off, persecutory partobject
relationship, in which they suddenly become the "bad" children of an angry and
punitive supernatural father. Thus, as a consequence oftheir desire to leave the cult, they
not only lose an idealised father but, because ofdefensive splitting, suddenly feel terrorised
by a sadistic, destructive father, who would rather destroy them than let them leave. The
vengeful Satan responds to their betrayal of him by using his demons to attack and punish
them. These frightening experiences are delusional persecutory fantasies of attacks on the
central selffrom bad internal objects associated with the destructive subpersonality.
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