THIS STUDY of Martin Luther as a young man was planned as a chapter in a book on emotional crises in late adolescence and early adulthood. But Luther proved too bulky a man to be merely a chapter. His young manhood is one of the most radical on record: whatever he became part of, whatever became part of him, was eventually destroyed or rejuvenated. The clinical chapter became a historical book. But since clinical work is integral to its orientation, I will, in this preface, enlarge briefly on my colleagues and my patients, and our common foci of preoccupation.
During the last five years a grant from the Field Foundation has enabled me to concentrate on the study of emotional disturbances of people in their late teens and early twenties. The clinical work with acutely disturbed young people was done mainly at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and at intervals at the Western Psychiatric Institute in the School of Medicine of the University of Pittsburgh. Austen Riggs is a small, open (i.e., with no closed facilities), research-minded private hospital in a small residential town in New England. The Western Psychiatric Institute is a skyscraper with closed floors, on one of the fastest-growing medical campuses in the world, in the center of the capital of steel. In Pittsburgh, under the generous direction of Dr. Henry W. Brosin and of Dr. Frederik Weniger, I was able to test my hypotheses on patients who came from backgrounds altogether different from those of the patients at Austen Riggs Center, where, thanks to Dr. Robert P. Knight’s vision, selective smallness permits a joint and systematic awareness of the therapeutic factors in all the areas of a patient’s life. Within the safe outlines of the diagnostic facilities and the therapeutic practices of both hospitals I could study the afflictions of young patients as variations on one theme, namely, a life crisis, aggravated in patients, yet in some form normal for all youth. I could identify those acute life tasks that would bring young people to a state of tension in which some would become patients; I could study their initial symptoms and the emergence of a psychiatric syndrome. I could explore possible similarities in their childhood experiences and discover what kinds of parents and what kinds of backgrounds would be apt to prejudice development in such a way that the life crisis of adolescence might prove insurmountable without special help or exceeding good fate, in the form of the opportunity to deploy special gifts under favorable conditions. Joan Erikson’s work in transforming at Riggs what once was occupational therapy into a meaningful “activities program” helped me to understand the curative as well as the creative role of work which, as we shall see, is so prominent in young Luther’s life, and in his views about work—and “works.”
Each new clinical experience supports and is supported by developments in theory. This book will more or less explicitly take account of recent thinking about the ego’s adaptive as well as its defensive functions. Sigmund Freud’s monumental work is the rock on which such exploration and advancement must be based. Anna Freud, with her book on the ego, opened a whole new theoretical area for study,1and August Aichhorn opened a therapeutic frontier in work with young people.2 What I have learned from them, from the writings of Heinz Hartmann,3 and in recent years from joint work with David Rapaport,4 I have tried to expand in line with new observations, first in a preliminary paper,5 and now in this book; a clinical monograph is to follow. Here I will say only that any comparison made between young man Luther and our patients, is, for their sake as well as his, not restricted to psychiatric diagnosis and the analysis of pathological dynamics, but is oriented toward those moments when young patients, like, young beings anywhere, prove resourceful and insightful beyond all professional and personal expectation. We will concentrate on the powers of recovery inherent in the young ego.
I must also acknowledge another kind of professional experience which helped focus my thoughts on a controversial figure in the history of ideas. In 1956, I gave the Yale Centenary address in honor of Sigmund Freud6 and also spoke on the hundredth anniversary of his birthday at the University of Frankfurt.7 I spoke of dimensions of lonely discovery, as exemplified in Freud the beginner, the first, and for a decade the only, psychoanalyst. I compared Freud with Darwin, and noted that neither man had come upon his most decisive contribution as part of an intended professional design; both lived through an extended intellectual “moratorium” and, in both, neurotic suffering accompanied the breakthrough of their creativity. The address on Freud, of course, bridged the clinical study of disturbances in youth which I was observing and treating with the method created by him, and conflicts of early adulthood which men like him fight through to the creativity of their manhood. Moreover, it seemed to me that Luther’s specific creativity represented a late medieval precursor of some aspects of Freud’s determined struggle with the father complex; even as Luther’s emancipation from medieval dogma was one of the indispensable precursors both of modern philosophy and of psychology.
Whatever references are made in this book to analogies in Luther’s and Freud’s lives are not derived from any impression of a personal likeness between these two men; far from it. But both men illustrate certain regularities in the growth of a certain kind of genius. They had, at any rate, one characteristic in common: a grim willingness to do the dirty work of their respective ages: for each kept human conscience in focus in an era of material and scientific expansion. Luther referred to his early work as “im Schlamm arbeiten” “to work in the mud,” and complained that he had worked all alone for ten years; while Freud, also a lone worker for a decade, referred to his work as labor in der Tiefe, calling forth the plight of a miner in deep shafts and wishing the soft-hearted eine gute Auffahrt, “a good ascent.”
I have attempted in this preface to give a brief rationale for writing this book; I doubt, though, that the impetus for writing anything but a textbook can ever be rationalized. My choice of subject forces me to deal with problems of faith and problems of Germany, two enigmas which I could have avoided by writing about some other young great man. But it seems that I did not wish to avoid them.
When speaking about Freud to the students at Frankfurt and at Heidelberg, I remembered an event in my own early years, a memory which had been utterly covered by the rubble of the cities and by the bleached bones of men of my kind in Europe. In my youth, as a wandering artist I stayed one night with a friend in a small village by the Upper Rhine. His father was a Protestant pastor; and in the morning, as the family sat down to breakfast, the old man said the Lord’s Prayer in Luther’s German. Never having “knowingly” heard it, I had the experience, as seldom before or after, of a wholeness captured in a few simple words, of poetry fusing the esthetic and the moral: those who have once suddenly “heard” the Gettysburg Address will know what I mean.
On occasion we should acknowledge emotional debts other than traumatic ones. Perhaps, then, this study is a tribute to a spring morning in that corner of Europe from which Schweitzer came; and an attempt to grasp something essential in that reformation which stands at the beginning of our era, something which we have neither completely lived down nor successfully outlived. Such is the material of psychoanalysis.
This book was made possible by a grant from the Foundation’s Fund for Research in Psychiatry which freed me for a year of all clinical and academic responsibilities.
The manuscript was read and criticized at various stages by David Rapaport, and also by Scott Buchanan, John Headley, Robert P. Knight, Margaret Mead, Gardner and Lois Murphy, Reinhold Niebuhr, and David and Evelyn Riesman. Both for the suggestions which I accepted and for those which I had to overrule, my heartfelt thanks.
Larry Hartmus read some of the medieval Latin with me in Ajijic. Edith Abrahamsen of Copenhagen checked my translation of Kierkegaard’s Danish.
Dorothy F. Hoehn ably assembled the pieces in a final typescript.
My wife, Joan Erikson, lived with me through the reading and the writing and sealed the experience by editing the manuscript.
ERIK HOMBURGER ERIKSON
Stockbridge, Massachusetts