THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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According to occult theory, there are forces and intelligences, whether
inside or outside the magician. which are conventially condemned as evil,
but a god who is wholly evil is as inconceivable as a god who is entirely
good. The true God, the One. is the totality of everything, containing all
good and evil, and reconciling all opposites (p. 338).
We need, however. to guard against a "cult of wholeness and integration", which both
Jungians and object relations theorists typically advocate, and which may prove as
equally as tyrannical as Christianity'S insistence on projecting its shadow onto the Devil.
Searles (1986), an analyst highly respected for his object relations understanding of
borderline and schizophrenic psychopathology. makes a profound comment on
psychological health:
I had long thought the sense of identity in a healthy person to be essentially
monolithic in nature. comprised in large part of well-digested part
identifications with other persons. But ... I have come to see that the healthy
individual's sense of identity is far from being monolithic in nature. Rather,
it involves myriad internal objects functioning in lively and harmonious
interrelatedness, all contributing to a relatively coherent, consistent sense of
identity which springs from and comprises all of them, but does not involve
their being congealed into so unitary a mass as I once thought. I have come to
believe that the more healthy a person is, the more consciously does he live in
the knowledge that there are myriad "persons" - internal objects each bearing
some sense-of-identity value - within him. He recognizes this state of his
internal world to be what it is - not threatened insanity, but the strength
resident in the human condition (p. 79-80).
All of us have demonic aspects to our personalities. All of us intuitively understand what
it means to be possessed by evil spirits. What one does with this experience, however,
determines one's psychological health and one's spiritual affiliations. It would be naive
to glibly assert that one should simply integrate one's "evil" aspects, particularly given
the origin and psychic status of these malevolent subpersonalities in the lives of these
hapless research subjects. As Hawthorne observes in his novel, Young Goodman Brown:
"The fiend in his own shape is less hideous than when he rages in the heart ofman". The
individuals in this study have looked into the abyss and experienced evil in one of its
purest forms. Our psychological insight that Satan and his demons are projected parts of