In the last three postings, we considered atonement beliefs and practices in a variety of religions. Buddhists tell stories of the Buddha's efforts to rescue others at the expense of his own wellbeing, and they engage in practices aimed at acquiring or transferring merit in hopes of easing the uneasiness of human existence. Jews celebrate atonement during Yom Kippur and remember Abraham's aborted sacrifice of his son Isaac. Atonement has always been central to Christian theology, and Islam with roots in Christianity and Judaism employs one of the most striking examples of atonement practice. Finally, Hindus take a radically different approach towards human uneasiness, seeking restoration of the "broken relationship" between the self and the universe through yogic discipline.

Some might think that the beliefs and practices presented in the first three articles are survivals from an era when humanity was less empirical and more imaginative in its approach to knowledge. Yet, atonement beliefs and practices not only survive, they also flourish in the 21st century. Nor are they limited to pre-industrial societies. In a future post, we will consider the social function of atonement beliefs and practices, but it is because such beliefs and practices appeal to a psychological want or need that they can serve a social function. Paul Pruyser recognized the connection between religion and psychology when he said, "Religion speaks to the emotions, uses them, prizes them selectively, and sees them as instruments for its own attitudinal and behavioral goals." Since the horse that pulls the atonement cart, then, is psychology, we turn now to an examination of the color and texture of the individual need that atonement ideas and practices address. Moreover, since differences mark individuals as often as do similarities, we will not be surprised to discover that they address several such needs. Yet, we can catalog their functions under three useful headings. Atonement beliefs and practices alleviate guilt, they provide a sense of security, and they enable personal growth. Here, I will examine the first two of these functions and next month's installment will consider the third.

The most obvious function of atonement beliefs and practices is the relief of guilt. We experience guilt as remorse for a particular sin or as a conscious or even unconscious sense of individual failure. Atonement beliefs and practices attempt to relieve both types of guilt. We can see the connection between atonement and guilt in the Christian tradition in its hymns. "In the old rugged cross, stained with blood so divine, a wondrous beauty I see; for 'twas on that old cross that Jesus suffered and died to pardon and sanctify me," marvels The Old Rugged Cross. The ancient practices associated with the Jewish Yom Kippur transferred the sins of the people to the scapegoat and they cleansed the temple and its furnishings. Finally, the collective penitence of the Shiite rituals provides an example of Muslim atonement for communal guilt.

Sigmund Freud may be the most famous or infamous psychologist to recognize atonement's connection to guilt. Attempting to uncover the roots of atonement beliefs, Freud speculated about a prehistoric "violent and jealous father who keeps all the females for himself." Their sexual desires frustrated, the sons respond by uniting to kill and eat their father. "After they had got rid of him," Freud wrote, "the affection which had ... been pushed under ... [made] itself felt ... in the form of remorse." The sons coped with their remorse by forbidding the killing of the totem animal, which they identified with the father whose life they had taken, and by forbidding incest. In doing the latter, they practiced a kind of deferred obedience. They also periodically celebrated a totem meal that memorialized the sons' actions, and became the foundation "of social organization, of moral restrictions, and of religion." Yet, the meal was more than a commemoration, for according to Freud, it became in the sons' imaginations, "a covenant with their father, in which he promised them everything that a childish imagination may expect from a father -- protection, care and indulgence."

This last phrase calls to mind Max Weber's comments on sacrifice. For Weber, sacrifice was a means of simultaneously coercing and enabling gods to fulfill the wants and needs of those who make the sacrifice. Early religions sacrificed both animals and humans to produce sunshine or rain or to insure agricultural fertility. Moreover, beliefs and practices aimed at obtaining a god's blessing or protection are not limited to aboriginal religions. Jews expect God to remember Abraham's aborted sacrifice of Isaac, and Shiite Muslims believe that they receive "salvation" because of Hussein's atoning death.

Freud derisively compared the idea of propitiating a god for material benefit to childhood wish fulfillment. He thought that, just as the individual child seeks an object of love outside of her ego, religious people project a god into the heavens to whom they relate, and from whom they expect the fulfillment of desires. While the metaphor seems off-putting, it nevertheless corresponds with recent theories concerning ego development. John Bowlby, for example, recognized a human emotional need to form attachments to others. He writes:


Bowlby calls the behavior that expresses this need, "attachment behaviour." He believes that such behavior has served the evolutionary function of protecting animals that are more vulnerable by encouraging them to stay close to a larger care-giving animal.

With its biological roots, it is hard to overestimate the stress to the human organism produced by separation. For Bowlby, attachment needs are akin to the needs for food and sex. Just as a young animal, separated from its parent senses its vulnerability, the human child and the human adult often experience a visceral terror when threatened with the loss of an important relationship. Nor does the fact that an adult knows that her survival is not threatened by the impending loss rob separation of its power to produce fear. Margaret Mahler describes this terror by saying that it is the realization of being "alone and helpless."

The significance of human attachment bonds goes beyond protection. Such bonds are also a prerequisite for the emotional investment required to discover and participate in the world. Describing a baby's first attempts to explore his world, Mahler observed that in the mother's absence, the child became easily frustrated and cried frequently. Shortly after the mother's return, the baby gained new energy. "With mother as an anchor," Mahler writes, "the frustrating part of the new experience and exploration became once again manageable ... We found that those children who had the best 'distance contact' with their mothers were the ones who would venture farthest away from her."

Yet the separation process is a normal part of human maturation. According to some theorists, the pain associated with separations experienced in adult life largely depends on the degree of organization achieved by the developing infant. An infant that receives the appropriate level of nurturing from her mother, who is the "bridge between the child's inner world and the outer world of reality," forms a mental concept of the world consistent with reality. On the other hand, improperly nurtured infants form inadequate models of reality. Inadequate parenting, then, results in more than emotional deprivation. It affects the manner in which the child perceives the world so that future separations threaten not only the person's self-esteem but also her sense of reality. Separation from a love object, says Althea Horner, "evokes a sense of disorganization and dissolution of the self." People fear separation, then, because it represents "the danger of dissolution of self."

Of the two needs considered so far in relationship to atonement, then, the need to restore or maintain "proximity to" a "stronger and wiser" person seems the greater. According to Pruyser, Freud believed that anxiety eventually reduced to the fear of loss of the love object. "Behind the fear," Pruyser writes, "lies the ... the desire for unity with the nurturing mother, the need to fit snugly into a beneficent universe, the urge to find and maintain a vital, homeostatic balance amidst the flux of all environments from subcellular to cosmic levels." We can conclude from this that guilt, when felt as anxiety, is at root the fear of losing the security that comes from attachment to a love object. One of Horner's patients expressed it this way, "the first need, the absolute need is love, and if we can't have that, we have to sacrifice everything else to having it."