THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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instinctual forces, unconsciously fused with childhood imagos of god-like parental
figures. Rather than man being created in the image of God, both God and Satan are
unconsciously created in the ambivalent image of man, manufactured from the fantasies
of young children struggling toward a moral identity amidst the turbulence of oedipal
desires and prohibitions.
Even in post-Freudian psychoanalysis, there is an obvious discursive gulf between the
Christian mythology of satanic evil, and the secular psychoanalytic mythology of
destructive instincts and internal objects, which is not easily spanned. The problem
psychology, as a secular discourse, faces, is that of understanding extremes of perversity
without invoking the notion of supernatural evil. The remainder of this chapter will be
concerned with addressing this problem from a Jungian and object relations perspective.
Jung (1960), unlike Freud, gave serious consideration to the phenomenon of evil, which
takes its place in Jungian thought as "an effective and menacing reality in opposition to
good, a psychological reality that expresses itself symbolically both in religious tradition
(as the devil) and in personal experience" (Samuels et aI, 1986). However, Jung's
position is a contradictory one. Good and evil are archetypal polarities and, hence,
empirical realities. Jung states in this regard: "Psychology must insist on the reality of
evil, and must reject any definition that regards it as insignificant or actually nonexistent"
(lung, 1951, p. 53). Jung thus rejected St Augustine's definition of evil as
privatio boni - the notion that evil has no existence in and of itself, but is merely the
diminution or absence of good (Moreno, 1970; Philp, 1958). Jung reinforces the reality
of evil by making a firm distinction between sin and evil: "I mean by 'sin' the offence
against our moral code, by 'evil' the black fiend ever working in man's nature" (Jung
cited in Philp, 1958, p. 211). This is problematic because analytical psychology has no
means of conceptualising the "black fiend". Psychoanalysis at least has the notion of the
death instinct to describe a force antagonistic to life, but Jung rejected this concept. This
leaves Jung in a position where any destructive aspect ofthe psyche must invariably serve
the life instinct, and hence, be associated with creativity (Samuels et aI, 1986). But ifevil