THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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study. When subjects report having literally seen Satan, and having been possessed by
demons, the "objective" truth of these events can obviously not be established in any
scientific sense. However, these experiences are very real to the subjects. The task ofthe
researcher is not to dismiss these accounts as "untrue", but rather to interpret the
subjective truth ofthe subjects' experiential reality.
This researcher began with the assumption that, despite different motives for selfdisclosure,
as well as duration and intensity of the relationship, qualitative research
subjects' accounts have much in common with psychoanalytic patients' reconstructions of
their lives. Both interviewees and patients produce autobiographical narratives, which
are already interpretations of who they are, what they are, and how they have attained
these identities. Both interviewees and patients are actively engaged in constructing
meaningful stories, rather than simply recounting the facts of historical life events.
Psychoanalytic interpretation provides a narrative scheme, i.e., an interpretative structure
which orders and renders experience intelligible by "linking diverse happenings along a
temporal dimension and by identifying the effect one event has on another" (Pokinghorne,
1988, p. 18). Consequently, the "facts" arrived at by means of a psychoanalytic
interpretation, notes Schafer (1992), "are inseparable from the investigator's precritical
and interrelated assumptions concerning the origins, coherence, totality, and intelligibility
ofpersonal action" (p. 213).
Psychoanalytic interpretations are retellings or re-interpretations of individuals' selfinterpretative
accounts. Moreover, as is clearly indicated in preceding chapters, there is
not simply one psychoanalytic interpretation of a given phenomenon. Different
psychoanalytic models ground interpretations in different narrative structures. If subjects'
accounts of their lives are narrative creations, researchers' interpretations are
metanarrative creations, no more dictated by empirical facts than are the subjects'
autobiographical accounts. Because interpretations are creative rather than veridical, an
interpretative metanarrative cannot be said to be true or false in a way that admits
scientific verification or falsification (Schafer, 1992; Spence, 1982). Schafer (1992)