Last month's post suggested that atonement beliefs play two important psychological functions. First, they relieve guilt, and next, and perhaps more importantly, they address the human need to be related to a "stronger and wiser other." To the degree that they meet these needs, they also help people achieve personal growth. Carl Jung thought of personal growth in terms of an increased capacity for engaging one's entire personality. He argued that women and men are at the same time both bad and good. People, he said, display their best personality traits - those traits that appear most desirable to the persons that they love and need. They also hide less desirable aspects of their personality behind a persona, a kind of mask. Paul Pruyser puts it this way: "The unacceptable thought and the forbidden impulse are removed from consciousness and excluded from memory so that hardly a trace of their actuality is felt." Jung believed that eventually such masks grow thin, since, as he pointed out, a persona is an inadequate definition of the self that leads to inadequate relationships by leaving unconscious and undistinguished much of one's core personality. Jung thought the most effective way to cope with the crisis that develops as one recognizes the inadequacy of her persona, was through a process called individuation. When a person individuates, she renounces her ego with its mask and accepts responsibility for those characteristics of personality formerly masked. The personality builds a relationship between the ego and its greater self by dethroning itself and becoming the servant of the self.

Margaret Mahler suggests the impact of atonement beliefs and practices on the process of individuation when she reminds her reader, "It is the mother's love of the toddler and the acceptance of" both the toddler's good and bad that enable the child to face his full self with equanimity. In other words, one learns, in the words of the old Scottish hymn, "to love the you you hide," when it is safe to do so. Mahler describes a child who was unsure of her mother's availability. This child, Mahler reports, split the world into "good and bad objects." Ominously, she continues, the splitting probably extended to the child's self-representation. If a child feels that mother will reject the negative in the child, the child will suppress the negative. If an adult feels that God will reject the negative in the believer, the believer will also hide the negative from God, from those she loves, and even from herself. Jung went further than this by saying that, in fact, one must deal with one's evil, and if one cannot recognize it, one will project it so that others appear to embody the evil. If on the other hand, the child believes that mother's love is unconditional, and that mother will not abandon her, she is free to recognize her less attractive traits, and to learn to manage them. If the believer posits a God or a universe willing to embrace both her "sin" and her "righteousness," she, too, will be able to manage her "sin" more effectively. Moreover, as she learns to recognize and manage her own evil, she will experience less need to project that evil onto others.

Relational security also leads to a greater comfort with complexity. Pruyser reminds his readers, "The toddler wants to be like his parents in every respect, indiscriminately." The adult, one hopes, becomes "more selective in his identifications, picking and choosing attributes from his friends, teachers, literary heroes, religious leaders, and even from divine examples...in order to be more lovable, loving, and love-worthy in the eyes of others and oneself." Another way of saying this is that the child lives in a black and white world in which the parents' "rules" govern his behavior. Adults, on the other hand, live in the more complex world in which judgments based on a variety of models have largely replaced rules. Part of the process of learning to cope with a world that demands judgments is emancipation from the idealization of cultural and parental norms embodied in the superego and reliance instead on the ego's judgment. Mahler states that the development of a healthy ego is often hampered when a child realizes, too abruptly, his separateness from his parents. By this, she suggests the importance of relational security to such emancipation and personal growth.

Atonement practices and theories, then, address at least three psychological needs. They alleviate guilt, but more importantly, they address the "cradle to grave" need for the security of a stronger or wiser other on which an individual can rely for a sense of safety in an insecure world. In doing this, they support the individual's formation of positive relationships with the world in which she lives. They also promote a healthy emotional development by supporting her struggle to own the negative as well as the positive aspects of her personality and her struggle to learn to rely on her judgment rather than on parental and cultural rules for decision making.

Many people fill some of these needs, and some may indeed fill all of them from sources other than atonement beliefs and practices. In particular, effective parenting, and absent effective parenting, effective psychotherapy may meet many of the needs addressed by atonement beliefs. Yet, to the degree to which individuals seek fulfillment of these needs through atonement beliefs and practices, we can evaluate the healthiness or unhealthiness of those beliefs and practices. While it is beyond the scope of these articles to evaluate the effectiveness of specific atonement practices, we can make some general observations.

John Bowlby noted that those who feel abandoned by a parent are "prone to periods of intense anxiety punctuated by outbursts of violent anger...[and are] extremely distrustful." Moreover, he adds that "repeated threats to abandon are as pathogenic as actual separation and probably more so." Atonement beliefs accompanied by a fear of separation then, are more likely to reinforce rather than assuage the terror of separation. Believers of any religion who live under the threat of hell or eternal separation live under the dual threat of divine and human abandonment. Atonement beliefs and practices that emphasize these threats do more harm than good. Moreover, the damage done by such beliefs is not limited to the person who holds the beliefs since they often foster less than optimal parenting behaviors and so set up a cycle of emotional abandonment from one generation to the next.

It seems logical that the converse is true. The one to whom atonement beliefs suggest a God or universe who will not abandon her regardless of shortcomings will experience less anxiety, be more trusting and be less prone to rage. Moreover, one who finds in atonement a relief of guilt or a restored relationship with the divine will have less need to hold rigidly to an overly positive self-concept. He will be more likely to risk owning his own weaknesses, and he will be more ready to take appropriate risks in order to know and be known by the world.

As I suggested in last month's post, atonement beliefs and practices serve social as well as psychological functions, and next month I will turn to their usefulness in limiting human violence, and promoting communal solidarity, moral and ethical definition, and community renewal.