THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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predisposition to structure experience in terms of primitive fantasy, personification, and
the projection ofself aspects, makes the manifestation of intrapsychic contents as external
supernatural figures a universal tendency. Demons are thus projected unconscious
personifications of composite intrapsychic figures, comprising split-off parts of the self
identified with internalised parental objects. These intrapsychic aspects are split off and
projected because they are associated with ego-dystonic childhood complexes, involving
destructive themes and feelings emerging from early negative interactions with parental
figures. The archetypal predisposition to assign supernatural meaning and imagery to
parental complexes is normally modified by adequate parenting. "Good enough"
parenting humanises the fantastically distorted maternal and paternal figures by allowing
for the withdrawal ofprojective identifications, and renders them more easily assimilable in
terms of the integrative developmental tendency of the self Parenting that is deficient,
insofar as it is characterised by neglectful or punitive behaviours or attitudes, will intensify
rather than moderate archetypal experience, resulting in the internalisation of higWy
destructive parental objects, both hated and feared. These objects, because of their
destructive nature, cannot be assimilated, and are experienced as alien and hostile internal
forces. Shadow aspects of the self, organised in terms of the bipolar structure of
archetypes, become identified and fused with these archaic parental object imagos. The
frightening composite of negative self and object aspects is defensively split off and
projected, where it assumes a semi-autonomous existence as a separate personified
identity structure, or alien subpersonality, manifest externally as some or other
supernatural entity. The imagery associated with the projected subpersonality will depend
on the cultural context ofthe children's upbringing, where myth and folklore will give the
subpersonality imaginal form. The Christian myths of western society provide Satan and
his demons as archetypal templates for projected destructive contents of the self. The
intrusive re-introjection of this persecutory subpersonality typically gives rise to the egodystonic
experience ofbeing possessed by an evil spirit.
The Satanist, however, employs the counterphobic defence of voluntarily inviting
possession and identifying with the destructive subpersonality.
This, in some inchoate