ABSTRACT
Atonement is a complex concept with strong religious overtones, but it also has psychological facets, both intra-psychic and interpersonal. Exploring the subject from the psychological prism, and illustrating it with examples from art, literature, and from his clinical experience, Irwin Rosen regards atonement as a psychological concept, an act stemming from the identification with the pain of the aggressed. Rosen posits that, in these cases, atonement is a desperate, regressive effort to maintain one's pathological survival in the face of a traumatic combination of guilt and anxiety. Rosen develops his ideas about this last facet and claims that atonement involves a temporary or long-term identification with the real or fantasized victim of one's own sadism, in which, magically, the aggressor seeks forgiveness by becoming one with the victim. Rosen's new and original idea with respect to atonement is that it includes an "identification with the aggressed". Atonement can be sought not only for deeds, but also for forbidden wishes.
