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appealing to instinctual wishes (particularly aggressive ones) and
possessing the ability to bring about in the masses a form of "instinc–
tual
renunciation" (control of aggression and "subordinat[ion of]
sense perception to abstract ideas") - Erikson has sought out more
specifically
historical
ground, the intersection of individual and col–
lective histories. Luther's achievement, then, depends not so much
upon instinctual renunciation as upon a quality Erikson sees Luther,
Gandhi and Freud to have all shared: "a grim willingness to do the
dirty work of their ages."
That "dirty work," though clearly involved with psychological
universals, is historically specific. "We cannot lift a case history out
of history," Erikson also tells us. And he feels constrained to ask of
himself
and of his readers the kind of immersion he imagines Luther
to have had in such early-sixteenth-century matters confronting
the young German aspirant to the priesthood as: the contradictions
between ideal Catholic spirituality and the "high spiritual finance"
of monetary purchase of immortality via the practice of indulgences,
the influence of Occamism in Catholic theology, the prevailing child–
rearing practices and standards of family (especially father-son)
relationships, the discipline of monastic training and the complexities
of the Catholic response to the Renaissance. In all
this
we leave
be–
hind Freud's concept of the traumatic historical event, followed by
repression, and then by the "return of the repressed" in the form
of guilt and conflict. We concern ourselves instead with the great
man's monumental struggles at the border of religion and politics,
with his simultaneous effort to remake himself and
his
world. For
Luther to emerge from
his
own identity crisis, he had to bring about
a shift in the historical identity of his epoch. He had to engage in
a desperate effort "to lift
his
individual patienthood to the level of
the universal one, and to try to solve for
all
what he could not solve
for himself alone."
By "patienthood" Erikson (here following Kierkegaard) means
exemplar of ultimate alternatives. And one of the extraordinary
qualities of Erikson's rendition of the young Luther
is
the book's
painstaking exploration of the very tenuous psychic boundaries
be–
tween identity crisis, psychosis, theological innovation and individual
and historical revitalization. What Erikson has demonstrated - in
this study of Luther as in his more recent book on Gandhi - is a
