Erik H. Erikson’s Young Man Luther: A Classic Revisited

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.