Erik H. Erikson’s Psychoanalytic Portrait of Martin Luther

Abstract

In my article (Capps in Pastoral Psychology, 2013a) I focused on the professional and personal reasons for Erik H. Erikson’s decision to write a book on Martin Luther (Erikson 1958) and his rationale for emphasizing Luther’s resourcefulness in emancipating himself from outworn religious beliefs and practices. I also discussed the fact that this book has continued to be meaningful to me since the first time I read it in the early 1960s. In a previous article (Capps in Journal of Religion & Health, 50, 880–898, 2011) I made the case that Erikson developed a form of psychoanalytic discourse—the verbal portrait—which, although not unprecedented, became a focal feature of his work and the testing ground for the cogency of his major contribution to psychoanalysis (the concept of identity). In this article, I provide a chapter-by-chapter summary of the book as a means to bring into focus Erikson’s “verbal portrait” of Martin Luther. Although a summary of the major points of each of the chapters cannot take the place of reading the book itself, it can help first-time readers to get their bearings. It can also help to dispel their anxieties on the one hand and their prejudgments on the other so that they may engage the book for what it is, namely, “a study in psychoanalysis and history.”