Abstract
The plan to translate Erik H. Erikson’s Young Man Luther (Erikson 1958) into Chinese (see Chen et al., Pastoral Psychology 61:641–654, 2012) provides compelling evidence that this book is a classic in psychology of religion and related fields. In this article I focus on the professional circumstances that contributed to Erikson’s decision to write a book on Martin Luther; his rationale, based on his particular psychoanalytic orientation, for emphasizing Luther’s resourcefulness in emancipating himself from outworn religious beliefs and practices; and the fact that a new personal appreciation for religious expressions also played an important role in his decision to write the book. I also discuss the fact that I was initially attracted to the book because it drew attention to Luther’s redefinition of work and did so in a way that was personally meaningful to me and in later years I have found the topics and themes of melancholy and inner peace to be personally meaningful to me as well. Based on my own experiences with Young Man Luther, I conclude that books become classics because they invite their potential readers to enter into the text in a way that is personally meaningful to them and that they remain classics because their readers discover new ways over the course of their own lives in which the book is personally meaningful to them. I conclude the article with the proposal that Young Man Luther is a religious biography.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
I realize that the phrase “psychology of religion and related fields” is rather vague. However, I am picking up here on the fact that the article by Chen et al. (2012) is titled “History, Present Situation, and Problems of Chinese Psychology of Religion” and noting that although Erikson’s Young Man Luther has been viewed as a major contribution to psychology of religion (see Wulff 1997, pp. 387–391), it has been even more influential in pastoral theology and pastoral psychology. This is due, in part, to the fact that, although it has often been an assigned reading in courses in psychology of religion taught in departments of religious studies in universities and colleges, it is not regularly assigned in courses in psychology of religion taught in departments of psychology. In contrast, it has regularly been assigned in seminary courses in pastoral theology, pastoral psychology, and pastoral care. This is due, in part, to the fact that the book has a Christian focus, but it is also because pastoral theology and pastoral psychology have been influenced historically by psychoanalysis, and Erikson’s Young Man Luther is illustrative of the fact that psychoanalysis and religion (including the Christian faith) are not necessarily incompatible.
I realize that the view of the “classic” presented in this article is rather idiosyncratic and that some readers may prefer the more traditional understanding of the classic as expressed, for example, in this dictionary definition of the classic as “of the highest class; being a model of its kind; excellent; standard; authoritative; established” (Agnes 2001, p. 271). However, the view presented here seems to me to have the merit of working against the tendency to distinguish classic and contemporary (see the subtitle of Wulff 1997). This distinction tends to consign the classic to the era in which it was written and to imply that it does not have contemporary relevance or significance.
It is worth noting in this connection that I first learned about Erikson’s Young Man Luther in my first year as a student at Yale Divinity School in 1960–1961. I was a student in the required year-long course in church history taught by Roland H. Bainton, a Reformation scholar and author of Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (Bainton 1950). One morning he came to class and announced that Young Man Luther was the worst book he had ever read on Luther. Perhaps his judgment was influenced by Erikson’s implied critique of his translation of a statement by Luther about a whipping he received from his father (1958, p. 64). As far as I know, Erikson’s only public response to Bainton’s critical review of Young Man Luther (Bainton 1959; see also Bainton 1971) was a reference to a church historian whom he does not name (but is clearly Bainton), who suggested “that a psychoanalytic study of Luther’s identity crisis was meant to show that Luther started the Reformation merely ‘for the satisfaction of his ego,’” thus using “ego” in a way that is “the opposite of the psychoanalytic meaning” (Erikson 1964, p. 146). Church historians’ negative view of the book seems not to have changed much over the years. For example, church historian Martin Marty suggested a few years ago (Marty 2004) that Erikson’s Young Man Luther is “semi-fictional” and that it “was long ago demolished by historians who found his reading of sources to be biased” (p. 2). Ironically, the “Luther” that he prefers over the “Luther” of Erikson’s text is, in fact, the “Luther” that Erikson presents.
In January 1939, Erikson was appointed as a Research Associate at the University of California Institute of Child Welfare and as a part-time Professor in the Department of Psychology with teaching limited to doctoral seminars. The position was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation (see Friedman 1999, pp. 151–152).
Erikson is referring here to the fact that all employees of the University of California were required to make a pledge of allegiance to the United States as a condition of their being hired.
In his discussion of Luther’s seeming slowness to speak out against the church practices, especially in the conduct of the Mass, which were profoundly disturbing to him, Erikson (1958) notes that the “image of Martin inhibited and reined in by a tight retentiveness must be supplemented by one which shows him taming his affects and restraining his speech until he would be able to say in one and the same explosive breath what he had come to really mean, what he really had thought through. In order to know himself what he thinks, such a ‘total’ man is dependent on his need to combine intellectual meaning with an inner sense of meaning it” (p. 176). I believe that Erikson viewed the students’ realization of this congruence between “intellectual meaning” and “an inner sense of meaning it” as fundamental to their education, whatever their academic field might happen to be.
This essay was presented in 1957 at an interdisciplinary symposium on “Evidence and Inference” at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the epilogue to Young Man Luther, published the following year, Erikson refers to the “glass darkly” image (I Cor. 13:12 KJV). This reference occurs in the fourth section of the epilogue, which begins with the observation that in this book on Martin Luther we are “dealing with a Western religious movement which grew out of and subsequently perpetuated an extreme emphasis on the interplay of initiative and guilt, and an exclusive emphasis on the divine Father-Son” (p. 263). In other words, this religious movement focuses on the psychosocial crisis encountered in the third stage of the life cycle (see Erikson 1950, pp. 224–226; also Erikson 1963, pp. 255–258). He adds, however, that “Even in this scheme, the mother remains a counter-player however shadowy” for “father religions have mother churches” (p. 263). Thus, he continues, “One may say that man, when looking through a glass darkly, finds himself in an inner cosmos in which the outlines of three objects awaken dim nostalgias” (pp. 263–264, emphasis added). The first of these objects is “the simple and fervent wish for a hallucinatory sense of unity with a maternal matrix,” the second is “the paternal voice of guiding conscience,” and the third is “the pure self itself, the unborn core of creation, the—as it were, preparental—center where God is pure nothing: ein lauter Nichts, in the words of Angelus Silesius” (p. 264). Noting that God is “so designated in many ways in Eastern mysticism,” he observes that this “pure self” is “the self no longer sick with a conflict between right and wrong, not dependent on providers, and not dependent on guides to reason and reality” (p. 264). If Angelus Silesius, a German mystic, sees God as “pure nothing,” this is because God is first experienced when one is in the womb, where there are no clearly identifiable visual images or auditory sounds. Perhaps this is the God that the young seminarian sought by means of his engagement in prayer.
The critical dream to which Friedman makes reference was the dream, as described by the patient, “of a big face sitting in a buggy of the horse-and-buggy days. The face was completely empty, and there was horrible, slimy, snaky hair all around it. I am not sure it wasn’t my mother” (Erikson 1964, p. 57). Erikson notes that when the patient related this dream and said that it vividly recalled his “state of panic at the time of his ‘mental breakdown’ which had caused him to interrupt his studies for missionary work abroad and enter treatment,” Erikson felt he needed to make an initial prediction as to whether the dream was a sign of an impending collapse or a potentially beneficial clinical case: “The first would mean that the patient is slipping away from me and I must think, as it were, of the emergency net; the second, that he is reaching out for me with an important message which I must try to understand and answer” (p. 61). He decided on the latter alternative, and this proved to be the correct one because the dream marked the turning point in what proved to be a successful therapeutic process.
It should be noted that although Erikson’s clinical work centered on patients in their teens and early twenties, he also had an occasional adult patient. In fact, one of his patients was the American artist Norman Rockwell, who was in his forties at the time (see Capps 2008a, 2013a, chap. 5, and 2013b).
I have picked up on Erikson’s emphasis on the resourcefulness of these “young beings” in my article titled “Erikson’s Schedule of Human Strengths and the Childhood Origins of the Resourceful Self” (Capps 2012a). The dictionary defines resourceful as the ability to deal creatively and effectively with problems, difficulties, etc. (Agnes 2001, p. 1221). The differs from resilience, which involves the ability to bounce back after being stretched, bent, or compressed (p. 1220).
Erikson discusses the meaning of his term “moratorium” in chapter 4 of Young Man Luther. The dictionary indicates that the word moratorium is “a legal authorization, usually by a law passed in an emergency, to delay payment of money due” and may apply, more generally, to “any authorized delay or stopping of some specified activity” (Agnes 2001, p. 936).
His reference here to Albert Schweitzer in the preface to a book on Martin Luther may be even more significant than it might at first appear because Schweitzer wrote a monograph published in 1906 that was critical of the psychiatric studies of Jesus that had been written in the late nineteenth century (Schweitzer 1948; see also Capps 2003 and 2008b pp. xxii-xxiii).
Erikson mentions his perilous emotional condition in his autobiographical essay “’Identity Crisis in Autobiographic Perspective” (Erikson 1975). He suggests that what he was suffering from at the time was a severe case of “identity confusion.” Although he chooses not to “describe” its “pathological side,” he goes on to note that it “included disturbances for which psychoanalysis seemed, indeed, the treatment of choice; no doubt such disturbances assumed at times what some of us today would call a ‘borderline’ character—that is, the borderline between neurosis and adolescent psychosis. But then, it is exactly this kind of diagnosis to which I undertook to give a developmental perspective by calling it an aggravated identity crisis of varying diagnostic types. No doubt, my best friends will insist that I needed to name this crisis and to see it in everybody else in order to really come to terms with it in myself. And they could, indeed, quote a whole roster of problems related to my personal identity” (which, as he goes on to note, included the fact that his biological father “abandoned” his mother before his birth) (pp. 26–27).
I discuss my search for a viable professional identity in Capps (2012b).
Note Erikson’s use of the word “coupon” in reference to what were termed “indulgences” in Luther’s time. An indulgence was a partial or complete remission, under conditions specified by the Church, of divine temporal punishment that might otherwise still be due for sin committed but forgiven (see Agnes 2001, p. 729). But the word “coupon” has the effect of diminishing the value of the indulgence and this, it would seem, was Luther’s point.
My initial venture in this regard was an article on a little-known nineteenth-century religious figure, Orestes Brownson, whose early career as a clergyman involved several changes in denominational affiliation (Capps 1968; also Capps 2005, chap. 6). It was followed two years later by an article on John Henry Newman that focused on what I called his “vocational identity” as it evolved during his twenties, thirties, and early forties (Capps 1970b; also Capps 2005, chap. 5) and a second article on Newman (1972) that focused on the personal associations in Newman’s poem “The Pillar of the Cloud” which was later set to music and became the familiar hymn “Lead, Kindly Light.” My doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago (1970a) was also inspired by Erikson’s Young Man Luther.
I met Erikson at the aforementioned conference in 1972 and two subsequent professional society meetings in the 1970s. But on December 18, 1981, he graciously consented to talk with me at length at his home in Tiburon, California. During this conversation I asked him if he considered himself a Christian, and he laughed and said, “Yes, if that doesn’t mean I have to be anti-Jewish.” He then went on to mention the personal meaningfulness of the symbolism of the Eucharist. He also gave me a copy of his recently published article on Jesus (Erikson 1981). Most meaningful to me was the fact that he stood on the front steps of his home and waved goodbye as I began to drive away. When I read in Lawrence Friedman’s biography of Erikson that Erikson and his family left Vienna in September 1933 and that Erik “had one fond memory of Vienna: Sigmund Freud came to the railroad station to see his family off, urging Erik to have a kind and loving heart” (Friedman 1999, p. 97), I thought of my own experience of watching Erik Erikson wave to me as I departed.
In At Home in the World (Capps 2013a), my most recent writing on melancholia, I draw on Erikson’s view in Identity: Youth and Crisis (Erikson 1968) that we possess a “composite Self” which is made up of various selves (p. 217) and suggest that one of these selves is the melancholy self. The melancholy self may not be among one’s predominant selves but, if so, this also means that a person “may not be consciously aware of its presence and of its role in his life, especially how it expresses itself in feelings of having lost something that was very precious to him, in the sense that he does not quite fit into the home environment, and in the desire to be at home in the world. This unconsciousness of its presence may also be true of a man who is clinically depressed, because there can be various other reasons for his depression in addition to or separate from the melancholy self” (pp. xii-xiv).
It was also at this time that I learned from a colleague, the biblical scholar Patrick D. Miller (see Miller 1993) that a psalm I had embraced during my period of vocational confusion was almost certainly written by a woman because the Hebrew word for “mother” is self-referential. This was Psalm 131, which reads, “O Lord, my heart is not lifted up, my eyes are not raised too high; I do not occupy myself with things too great and too marvelous for me. But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a child quieted at its mother’s breast; like a child that is quieted is my soul. O Israel, hope in the Lord from this time forth and for ever more.” Repeating this psalm to myself whenever I began to feel anxious about my future prospects brought an immediate sense of inner peace.
References
Agnes, M. (Ed.). (2001). Webster’s new world college dictionary (4th ed.). Foster City: IDG Books Worldwide.
Aichhorn, A. (1935). Wayward youth. New York: Viking.
Bainton, R. H. (1950). Here I stand: A life of Martin Luther. New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press.
Bainton, R. H. (1959). Luther: A psychiatric portrait. The Yale Review, 48, 406–410.
Bainton, R. H. (1971). Psychiatry and history: An examination of Erikson’s Young man Luther. Religion in life, 40, 450–478.
Barzun, J. (1974). Clio and the doctors: Psycho-history, quanto-history and history. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Capps, D. (1968). Orestes Brownson: The psychology of religious affiliation. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 7, 197–209.
Capps, D. (1970a). John Henry Newman: A study of religious leadership. Doctoral dissertation, University of Chicago.
Capps, D. (1970b). John Henry Newman: A study of vocational identity. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 9, 33–51.
Capps, D. (1972). A biographical footnote on Newman’s “Lead, Kindly Light.” Journal of Church History, 41, 480–486.
Capps, D. (1978). Psychohistory and historical genres: The plight and promise of Eriksonian biography. In P. Homans (Ed.), Childhood and selfhood: Essays on religion and modernity in the thought of Erik Erikson (pp. 189–228). Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.
Capps, D. (1996a). Do not despair of this world: A posthumous review of Erik H. Erikson’s writings. Religious Studies Review, 22, 323–332.
Capps, D. (1996b). Erikson’s “inner space”: Where art and religion converge. Journal of Religion and Health, 35, 93–115.
Capps, D. (1997a). Childhood fears, adult anxieties, and the longing for inner peace: Erik H. Erikson’s psychoanalytic psychology of religion. In J. L. Jacobs & D. Capps (Eds.), Religion, Society, and Psychoanalysis: Readings in Contemporary Theory (pp. 127–162). Boulder: Westview Press.
Capps, D. (1997b). Men, religion, and melancholia: James, Otto, Jung, Erikson. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Capps, D. (2000). Jesus: A psychological biography. St. Louis: Chalice Press. Republished by Wipf and Stock Publishers in 2010.
Capps, D. (2002a). A summary of Jesus: A psychological biography. Pastoral Psychology, 50, 475–480.
Capps, D. (2002b). Men and their religion: Honor, hope, and humor. New York: Continuum.
Capps, D. (2003). Beyond Schweitzer and the psychiatrists: Jesus as fictive personality. HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies, 59: 621–662. Reprinted in J. H. Ellens and W. G. Rollins (Eds.) (2004), Psychology and the Bible, vol. 4, pp. 89–124. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Capps, D. (2005). Young clergy: A biographical-developmental study. New York: Routledge.
Capps, D. (2007a). Mother, melancholia, and art in Erik H. Erikson’s Toys and Reasons. Journal of Religion and Health, 46, 369–383.
Capps, D. (2007b). Mother, melancholia, and play in Erik H. Erikson’s Childhood and Society. Journal of Religion and Health, 46, 591–606.
Capps, D. (2008a). Erik H. Erikson, Norman Rockwell, and the therapeutic functions of a questionable painting. American Imago, 65, 191–228.
Capps, D. (2008b). Jesus the village psychiatrist. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press.
Capps, D. (2008c). Mother, melancholia, and dreams in Erik H. Erikson’s Insight and Responsibility. Journal of Religion and Health, 47, 103–117.
Capps, D. (2008d). Mother, melancholia, and humor in Erik H. Erikson’s earliest writings. Journal of Religion and Health, 47, 415–432.
Capps, D. (2008e). The mother relationship and artistic inhibition in the lives of Leonardo da Vinci and Erik H. Erikson. Journal of Religion and Health, 47, 560–576.
Capps, D. (2009a). Erikson’s case of the theological student. Pastoral Psychology, 58, 325–335.
Capps, D. (2009b). Relaxed bodies, emancipated minds, and dominant calm. Journal of Religion and Health, 48, 368–380.
Capps, D. (2012a). Erikson’s schedule of human strengths and the childhood origins of the resourceful self. Pastoral Psychology, 61, 269–283.
Capps, D. (2012b). The path of least resistance. In J. A. Belzen (Ed.), Psychology of religion: Autobiographical accounts (pp. 43–52). New York: Springer.
Capps, D. (2013a). At home in the world: A study in psychoanalysis, religion, and art. Eugene: Cascade Books.
Capps, D. (2013b). The embarrassing Adam’s apple, compromised masculinity, and hope: The case of Norman Rockwell. Pastoral Psychology (published online February 5).
Capps, D. (1977). Gandhi’s Truth as religious biography. In D. Capps, W. H. Capps, & M. G. Bradford (Eds.), Encounter with Erikson: Historical interpretation and religious biography (pp. 141–175). Missoula: Scholars Press.
Chen, Y., Wang, J., Weng, H., & Wang, X. (2012). History, present situation, and problems of Chinese psychology of religion. Pastoral Psychology, 61, 641–654.
Erikson, E. H. (1950). Childhood and society. New York: W. W. Norton.
Erikson, E. H. (1956). The problem of ego identity. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 4, 56–121.
Erikson, E. H. (1958). Young man Luther: A study in psychoanalysis and history. New York: W. W. Norton.
Erikson, E. H. (1959). Identity and the life cycle. New York: International Universities Press. Republished by W. W. Norton 1980.
Erikson, E. H. (1963). Childhood and society (rev. ed.) New York: W. W. Norton.
Erikson, E. H. (1964). Insight and responsibility: Lectures on the ethical implications of psychoanalytic insight. New York: W. W. Norton.
Erikson, E. H. (1968). Identity: Youth and crisis. New York: W. W. Norton.
Erikson, E. H. (1969). Gandhi’s truth: On the origins of militant non-violence. New York: W. W. Norton.
Erikson, E. H. (1975). “Identity crisis” in autobiographic perspective. In E. H. Erikson (Ed.), Life history and the historical moment (pp. 17–47). New York: W. W. Norton.
Erikson, E. H. (1981). The Galilean sayings and the sense of “I.” The Yale Review, 70, 321–362.
Erikson, E. H. (1982). The life cycle completed: A review. New York: W. W. Norton.
Erikson, E. H. (1987). Statement to the committee on privilege and tenure of the University of California concerning the California loyalty oath. In E. H. Erikson & S. Schlein (Eds.), E. H. Erikson, A way of looking at things: Selected papers from 1930 to 1980 (pp. 618–620). New York: W. W. Norton.
Erikson, J. M. (1976). Activity, recovery, growth: The communal role of planned activities. With D. Loveless and J. Loveless. New York: W. W. Norton.
Freud, A. (1946). The ego and the mechanisms of defense. New York: International Universities Press. Orig. pub. 1936.
Friedman, L. J. (1999). Identity’s architect: A biography of Erik H. Erikson. New York: Scribners.
Hartmann, H. (1956). Notes on the reality principle. In Eissler, R. S., et al. (Eds.). The psychoanalytic study of the child, 11: 31–53. New York: International Universities Press.
Hartmann, H. (1958). Ego psychology and the problem of adaptation. D. Rapaport (Trans.). New York: International Universities Press. (Orig. pub. 1938.)
Marty, M. E. (2004). Which Luther? The Christian Century, 10, 30–31.
Miller, P. D. (1993). Things too wonderful: Prayers women prayed. In P. D. Miller (Ed.), They cried to the Lord: The form and theology of biblical prayer (pp. 233–243). Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press.
Rapaport, D. (1953). Some psychological considerations concerning activity and passivity. Unpublished paper.
Rapaport, D. (1958). The theory of ego autonomy: A generalization. Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 22, 13–35.
Schweitzer, A. (1948). The psychiatric study of Jesus: Exposition and criticism. C. L. Joy (Trans.). Boston: Beacon Press. (Orig. pub. 1913.)
Wulff, D. M. (1997). Psychology of religion: Classic and contemporary (2nd ed.). New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Capps, D. Erik H. Erikson’s Young Man Luther: A Classic Revisited. Pastoral Psychol 64, 327–343 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-013-0564-2
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11089-013-0564-2