ironment of freedom and authority will help him
achieve a balance between love and hate, co-operation and willfulness.
An early sense of trust, we see, is necessary for the development of
autonomy. Without trust the child will not feel free to struggle, as he
must, for its achievement. He will not feel free, because he does not
have faith either in himself or in his world, in relation to which he
must struggle.

The objective of love, therefore, is to provide a relationship of
firmness and tolerance within which a child may become autonomous and
acquire a sense of self-control, self-esteem, and relationship with
others. Otherwise he may suffer loss of confidence in himself and become
skeptical of others, a result which can be the fruit of either
restrictive discipline or unstructured freedom.

The achievement of a sense of autonomy must always remain relative, and
will vary from individual to individual. As we have seen, there is no
fixed norm for human behavior, and the best sense of autonomy that
anyone can possibly achieve is one in which there is a mixture of
co-operation and willfulness, of love and hostility. We can only hope
and pray that as we all mature our autonomy will be employed with
creative good will, and that it will be capable of dealing with the
results of our hostility and stubbornness.

Although our sense of autonomy appears during our second and third year
of life, its further development depends upon our relationship with
others. Furthermore, its employment has other arenas than that of family
life. The dialogue from which autonomy grows moves out of family and
into the neighborhood. It is quickened and disciplined by entrance into
school, is heated and tempered by the development of social life,
especially by the dialogue between the sexes when the need to surrender
oneself to the other meets the needs of each to be oneself.

Finally, the autonomy of the individual is sure to be challenged by the
complexities and organization of modern industrial society. More and
more the individual is being caught in the intricacies of a process in
which his sense of autonomy and initiative is violated. The problems of
the social order are so massive that the interests of the individual
often are sacrificed. Increasingly, people are unable to endure the
frustrations caused by their social, political, and industrial
environment, and develop neurotic responses in which their aggressions
are turned in on themse