Abstract
This essay explores ways in which Erik H. Erikson's interests in art and religion converge in his psychology of religion. By associating Erikson'sYoung Man Luther with portraiture and his essays on “womanhood and the inner space” with still life, the author employs artistic genres to resituate the interpretation of Erikson's key texts on religion. By way of Erikson's image of the “inner space,” connections are drawn betweenYoung Man Luther and his essays on womanhood. His late essay on Jesus is also linked to the earlier “inner space” essays, demonstrating that a central feature of Erikson's psychology of religion is its reformulation of traditional psychoanalytic theory of ritual.
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References
Erikson, E.,Childhood and Society, 2nd rev. ed. New York: W.W. Norton, 1963, p. 18.
James, W.,The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Penguin, 1982, pp. 491–498.
Pruyser, P., “Lessons from Art Theory for the Psychology of Religion,”Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1976, 15, p. 1.
Ibid., p. 10.
Ibid., pp. 10–11.
Erikson, E.,Identity and the Life Cycle. New York: W.W. Norton, 1980, p. 7.
Coles, R.,Erik H. Erikson: The Growth of His Work. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970, p. 15.
Erikson, E.,Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History. New York: W.W. Norton, 1958, p. 196.
Erikson, E.,Life History and the Historical Moment. New York: W.W. Norton, 1975, pp. 29–30.
Erikson,Young Man Luther, p. 213. My emphasis.
Ibid., p. 36.
Ibid., pp. 191–192.
Ibid., p. 263.
Ibid., p. 264.
James, W.,The Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, New York: Dover, 1950, p. 185.
Erikson, E.,Toys and Reasons. New York: W.W. Norton, 1975, pp. 87, 89.
Ibid., p. 91. My emphasis.
Brilliant, R.,Portraiture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991, p. 9.
Ibid., p. 9.
Erikson,Identity and the Life Cycle, pp. 158–161. Also, Erikson, E.,Identity: Youth and Crisis. New York: W.W. Norton, 1968, pp. 216–221.
Brilliant,op. cit., p. 156.
Erikson, E.,A Way of Looking at Things: Selected Papers from 1930 to 1980. ed. Stephen Schlein. New York: W.W. Norton, 1987, p. 46.
Ibid., pp. 618–620.
Erikson,Young Man Luther, pp. 72–73.
Erikson,Life History and the Historical Moment, p. 31.
Erikson,Young Man Luther, p. 208.
Ibib., pp. 223–224.
In a forthcoming article inReligious Studies Review, I argue that Erikson's transition from an ego psychologist to a self psychologist occurred in the late 1960s, and that this transition is most clearly reflected in his “Theoretical Interlude” inIdentity: Youth and Crisis, pp. 208–231.
Erikson,Young Man Luther, pp. 265–266. My emphasis.
Erikson,Identity: Youth and Crisis, pp. 261–264. Also,Life History and the Historical Moment, pp. 225–247.
Millett, K.,Sexual Politics. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969.
Gilligan, C.,In a Different Voice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. See Erikson,Childhood and Society, pp. 285–325.
Erikson, E.,Insight and Responsibility. New York: W.W. Norton, 1964, pp. 166–174. Of his analysis of the Dora case, Hannah S. Decker writes, “Dora's adult life was to prove him right.” See herFreud, Dora, and Vienna 1900. New York: The Free Press, 1991, p. 113.
Erikson,Identity: Youth and Crisis, p. 270.
Ibid., pp. 273, 277–278.
Ibid., p. 280.
Ibid., p. 281.
Ibid., pp. 284, 289.
Ibid., pp. 290–291.
See also Erikson,Childhood and Society, p. 410.
Erikson,Identity: Youth and Crisis, pp. 293–294.
Erikson,Life History and the Historical Moment, p. 228.
Ibid., p. 228. Original quotation is on p. 215 ofSexual Politics.
Ibid., p. 228.
In the final section ofThe Life Cycle Completed, entitled “Historical Relativity and the Psychoanalytic Method,” Erikson notes that when Einstein's relativity theory became popular, it seemed at best to have “unbearably relativistic implications, seemingly undermining the foundations of any firm human ‘standpoint’; and yet, it opens a new vista in which relative standpoints are ‘reconciled’ to each other in fundamental invariance.” He then suggests that soma, ethos, and psyche (his new words for the somatic, historical and individual) are relative to one another, and that the individual with a true “sense of ‘T’” will not allow one or another of these “standpoints” a dominating influence. New York; W.W. Norton, 1982, pp. 96–97.
Erikson,Life History and the Historical Moment, p. 229.
Ibid., p. 236.
Ibid., p. 236.
Ibid., p. 243.
Ibid., p. 242.
Ibid., p. 247.
On this point, see Erikson's brief address at the Appleton Chapel at Harvard University on the occasion of the moon landing, inA Way of Looking at Things, pp. 745–747.
Bryson, N.,Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990, p. 136.
Ibid., p. 137.
Ibid., pp. 138–139.
Ibid., p. 154.
Ibid., pp. 157–158.
Ibid., p. 160.
Ibid., p. 167.
Ibid., p. 169.
Ibid., p. 170.
Ibid., p. 172.
Ibid., pp. 172–173.
Ibid., p. 177.
Erikson,Identity: Youth and Crisis, p. 278.
Erikson,Life History and the Historical Moment, p. 234.
Millett, too, observes the “awkwardness” reflected in Erikson's original essay, though she claims that “the uneasy, even contradictory, tone of the essay is due to the fact that Erikson vacillates between two versions of woman, Freud's chauvinism and a chivalry of his own” (p. 212). Rather, I attribute its “uneasy tone” to something much deeper: his sense of being an outside observer of what he experienced earlier, as an infant, as a certified insider. Hence, he is ambivalently alienated and nostalgic. In his autobiographical essay inLife History and the Historical Moment, he reports that his mother and stepfather “kept secret from me the fact that my mother had been married previously; and that I was the son of a Dane whohad abandoned her before my birth. They apparently thought that such secretiveness was not only workable (because children then were not held to know what they had not been told) but also advisable, so that I would feel thoroughlyat home in their home. As children will do, I played in with this and more or less forgot the period before the age of three,when mother and I had lived alone.” In the three years before his mother re-married, “her friends had been artists working in the folk style of Hans Thoma of the Black Forest. They, I believe, provided my first male imprinting before I had to come to terms withthat intruder, the bearded doctor [his stepfather], with his healing love and mysterious instruments” (p. 27, my emphases). His references in his essay on “Womanhood and the Inner Space” to the woman's fear of “being left” (abandoned) and his suggestion that men are essentially “intruders” into the inner space are thus deeply autobiographical, except that he sees the latter from the perspective of a child who had been displaced from his original home and from his exclusive possession of his mother by his stepfather.
Erikson,Identity: Youth and Crisis, p. 271.
Erikson, E., “The Galilean Sayings and the Sense of ‘I’,”The Yale Review, 70, 1981, 321–362.
Erikson,Toys and Reasons, p. 85ff.
Erikson,Childhood and Society, pp. 176–177.
Erikson,Toys and Reasons, pp. 81–82.
Erikson, “Galilean Sayings,”, p. 340.
Ibid., p. 345.
Ibid., p. 346.
Ibid., p. 351.
Crossan, J.,Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1993, p. 70. See also hisThe Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991, pp. 341–344.
Erikson,Life History and the Historical Moment, p. 176.
Ibid., p. 177.
Erikson, “The Galilean Sayings,” p. 356. This analysis of Jesus's disruption of the “inner space” could be expanded to include the story of his attempt to purify the Temple in Jerusalem (his “making of history”). As Daniel Halperin points out, for the prophet Ezekial the Temple was symbolic of the woman's womb. Was Jesus a latter-day Ezekial seeking to rid the “inner space” of its impurities, and, if so, what were the psychological motivations behind this symbolic act? Did his throwing out of the money-changers have something to do with his own hostility toward male intruders who werenot there by the woman's invitation (i.e., rapists)? See Halperin,Seeking Ezekial: Text and Psychology. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993, pp. 151–154. And did this hostility have a deep personal motivation? Jane Schaberg argues that his mother, Mary, a twelve year old girl at the time of her conception of Jesus, was the victim of rape. See Schaberg,The Illegitimacy of Jesus: A Feminist Theological Interpretation of the Infancy Narratives. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987, pp. 42–62.
Pruyser,op. cit., p. 3.
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Capps, D. Erikson's “inner space”: Where art and religion converge. J Relig Health 35, 93–115 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02354520
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02354520