ABSTRACT
In Anna Freud's recognition of the depth of Shakespeare's insight into the nature of atonement, people see the genius of those two grand masters of creative condensation at work, for that brief couplet expresses many ideas. Atonement, and its identification with the pain of another, is a complex and broad-ranging process spanning an array of healthy, consciously and unconsciously motivated socially laudable outcomes as well as pathological expressions. In the literature on the response to such dreaded guilt and anxiety, there appear to be two major, unconscious "atonement narratives", which serve as organizers of the search for forgiveness, whether the sources of such "guiltxiety" be external or intrapsychic. The word atonement itself has many popularly employed "almost-synonyms," each incompletely expressing a partial component of the atoner–forgiver dyadic experience. Some atoners emerge as "compulsive confessors", who, in marriage seek to turn their partners into "infidelity-sniffing Dalmatians", or to re-enact earlier scenarios of betrayal and forgiveness.
