THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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to peer groups and teachers within the school environment. However, their archetypal
experience as outsiders, together with the projection of negative parental figures into
others, means that both peers and teachers are perceived to be critical and rejecting. With
hindsight, subject four demonstrates some awareness of this dynamic: "I hated my
teachers ... It was a feeling I got towards all authority figures. It was something inside
me - a feeling I got that nobody liked me. Looking back on it now, I think it was only my
perspective ... no-one actually hated me as such; it was just a psychological plot that I
thought was going on".
Subjects' maladaptive behaviour in the form of either social withdrawal or aggreSSIOn
aggravates their experience of being outcasts, and leaves them feeling friendless, isolated,
and inferior. Subject five recalls: "I had no real friends, I deviated from what others
thought was normaf'. Subject six describes a similar sense of peer estrangement: "I was
looked upon as weird, mainly because I was so much of a loner". This alienation
syndrome, as Meissner (1987) refers to it, is aggravated by the belief that as "poor" whites
under a black government committed to eradicating historical white privilege, and
empowering blacks through vigorous affirmative action, they have little prospect of
attaining social status, ca~eer security, or financial comfort. 1
Individuals attracted to Satanism are struggling with psychological issues which appear to
them to be unresolvable within the institutional framework of broader society. Sociopolitical
turbulence, cultural dislocation, and rapid ideological transformation establish a
context of social discontinuity, in which a society's old institutional structures and belief
systems no longer suffice to meet the social and psychological needs of a sector of the
population. The sector most susceptible comprises adolescents and young adults, whose
developmental task of establishing a secure individual identity involves a psychosocial
moratorium and a temporary distancing from the ideologies ofparental and other authority
figures. A stable, well-functioning society provides and recognises a range of identity
J It should be noted that the socio-economic context ofthe subjects' cult involvement was not explicitly
addressed in the interviews, and the author's deductions in this regard are speculative.