50 Psychology Classics (18 page)

Born in Aurum, Nevada in 1901, Erickson was color blind, tone deaf, and dyslexic. When he was young his family traveled in a covered wagon to Wisconsin, where they established a farm
.

Erickson studied psychology at the University of Wisconsin, where he learnt how to hypnotize people. He gained his medical degree through the Colorado General Hospital, and worked as a junior psychiatrist at Rhode Island State Hospital. From 1930–34 he was at Worcester State Hospital, becoming chief psychiatrist, followed by clinical and teaching appointments in Eloise, Michigan. There he married Elizabeth Erickson; they had five children, in addition to three he had in a previous marriage
.

In 1948 Erickson moved to Phoenix for health reasons, where his “miracle” cures brought people to him from across America. He hypnotized writer Aldous Huxley, and counted among his friends anthropologist Margaret Mead and philosopher Gregory Bateson. He was founder of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis and a fellow of the American Psychological and Psychiatric Associations
.

Erickson died in 1980. His ashes were scattered on Squaw Peak in Phoenix, which he had often ordered patients to climb as part of their treatment
.

Sidney Rosen
is assistant clinical professor in the psychiatric department of the New York University Medical Center. He has presented workshops on Ericksonian techniques, and wrote the foreword to Erickson's
Hypnotherapy: An Exploratory Casebook
(1979), written with Ernest L. Rossi
.

“I have called the major crisis of adolescence the
identity crisis;
it occurs in that period of the life cycle when each youth must forge for himself some central perspective and direction, some working unity, out of the effective remnants of his childhood and the hopes of his anticipated adulthood.”

“No doubt when Martin learned to speak up, much that he had to say to the devil was fueled by a highly compressed store of defiance consisting of what he had been unable to say to his father and to his teachers; in due time he said it all, with a vengeance, to the Pope.”

In a nutshell

Crises of identity, while painful at the time, are necessary to forge a stronger, more commanding self.

In a similar vein
Nathaniel Branden
The Psychology of Self-Esteem
(p 42)
William James
The Principles of Psychology
(p 162)
Gail Sheehy
Passages
(p 260)

If you have ever talked about having an “identity crisis” you have psychologist Erik Erikson to thank for inventing the term. Erikson's focus on identity was shaped by his own background. The product of a brief affair between his married Jewish mother, Karla Abrahamsen, and an unidentified Danish man, he grew up in Germany as Erik Homberger, taking the surname of his physician stepfather. At school he was teased for being Jewish, while at the synagogue he was pilloried for his “Nordic god” appearance; he was tall, blond, and blue-eyed. When three half-sisters came along, this only intensified his feeling of being an outsider. In his late 30s, on taking up US citizenship, Erik Homberger changed his surname to Erikson; that is, son of himself.

While Erikson paid particular attention to the formation of identity in adolescence, his great contribution was to note that the question “Who am I?” will raise itself many times over the course of an average person's lifetime. Freud identified five stages of psychological development from infancy to the teenage years, but Erikson went further to cover the whole life cycle, with eight “psychosocial” stages from birth to old age. As one stage ends, we experience a crisis when our identity comes into question, and at these points we can choose either growth or stagnation. Each choice, he said, lays another cornerstone in the structure of the adult personality. In fully appreciating the intensity of these turning points, he shattered the myth that life after we turn 20 is one long flat line of stability.

Erikson is famous for another reason. Although Freud had written a celebrated study of Leonardo da Vinci, it was Erikson's books on Gandhi and Martin Luther that established a new genre, “psychobiography” or the application of psychological analysis to famous people's lives. In Luther he found an example of identity crisis
par excellence
, described in
Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History
.

The Christian Europe of Luther's childhood and adolescence was preoccupied with the “Last Judgment,” a final accounting of one's life in which all sins would be balanced against the good. People lived in fear of going to hell, and prayed relentlessly for the souls of those who had died. Public torture of criminals was common, as were caning and whipping children in school. The theme of life was total obedience: to one's elders, to the Church, to God.

Into this “world-mood of guilt and sadness,” as Erikson described it, Martin Luther was born in 1483. His father came from peasant stock, but through hard work became a small-scale capitalist with an ownership stake in a mine. Hans Luther created a nest egg for his son's education, intending him to become a high-ranking lawyer who would vault the family out of its humble origins. Martin Luther duly went to Latin school and did well, and at 17 entered university. In 1505 he graduated and enrolled in law school. However, while at home for the summer break he was almost struck by lightning during a thunderstorm. Already having misgivings about the life path laid out for him, he took the event as a sign and vowed to become a monk. His parents were devastated, but in 1501 he entered the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt.

At first all went well, as he enjoyed the holy atmosphere of the monastery. Nevertheless, like any young man he was tempted by sexual thoughts and consumed by guilt over them. As the many Luther biographers tell the story, he had some kind of panic attack in the choir of his monastery church, crying out “I am
not
!” Erickson saw the event as indicating a classic identity crisis. Luther had left behind the secular career (not to mention marriage) his father had so wanted him to follow, yet now, after a promising “godly” beginning, the monastery path seemed wrong as well, despite his desperate efforts to cling to his vows. He was caught in a terrible no-man's-land of identity. Whatever he thought he was, it was painfully clear he was not.

Yet Martin stayed with the Church, ascending quickly. He became a doctor of theology and by 1515 was a vicar in charge of 11 monasteries. All the time, though, a gap was growing between his understanding of genuine spiritual faith and his perception of the Church. According to medieval Catholic doctrine, sins required some kind of worldly punishment, which could be alleviated by doing “good works.” But even this responsibility could be sidestepped by the purchase of “indulgences,” pieces of paper sold by the Church that poured money into its coffers. Even this issue was just the tip of the iceberg for Luther. Quite radically, he had come to the belief that the authority of the Bible (the “Word”) was far more important than the authority of an institution.

Things came to a head when, in October 1517, he nailed a document—the famous “95 Theses”—to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg (a usual place for posting public notices), outlining the areas where the Church had to reform. The document was a bombshell, but might never have had the impact it did were it not for the recent invention of the printing press, which enabled this and Luther's later writings to be spread far and wide. Anyone, from peasant to prince, who had a gripe with the status quo now had a focus. Luther became a celebrity, and his rebellion sparked off the Protestant Reformation.

Rebellion is usually manifested in one's younger years, but Luther was 34 by the time he properly spoke out against the Church. Erikson's explanation was that young people must first believe in something intensely before they turn against it, and Luther was desperate to believe in the Church's divine authority. He may never have become its most vocal critic if he had not first gone through the experience of complete devotion and attachment. Erikson commented that great figures in history often spend years in a passive state. From a young age they feel that they will create a big stamp on the world, but unconsciously they wait for their particular truth to form itself in their minds, until they can make the most impact at the right time. This was the case with Luther.

Erikson gave a great deal of space to a psychoanalytical discussion of Luther's relationship with his father. He surmised that Luther's courage in standing up to the Holy Roman Church can only be understood in the context of his initial disobedience to his father. Perhaps surprisingly, Erikson suggested that Luther was not rebellious by nature, but having once defied the major figure in his life, this put him on a trajectory of disobedience.

Erikson's most intriguing point was that Luther did change the world via his theological position, but that position was the result of working out his own personal demons and identity crises. Was he Luther the good monk, Luther the good son, or Luther the great reformer?

Erikson likened major identity crises to a “second birth,” an idea that he got from William James. While once-born people “rather painlessly fit themselves and are fitted into the ideology of their age,” twice-born people are often tortured souls who seek healing in some total conversion experience that will give them direction. The positive aspect of the twice born is that if they do successfully transform themselves, they have the potential to sweep the world along with them. It took a while for Luther to work out who he was, but once he had done so not even the Pope could stop him.

Erikson considered a society's ability to accommodate youthful identity crises as extremely important. He wrote about the concept of “moratorium,” a period of time or an experience that a culture deliberately creates so that young people can “find themselves” before embarking on proper adulthood. Today, we may take a “gap year” between finishing school and starting college. In Luther's time a period in the monastery gave many young men an opportunity to decide “what one is and is going to be.”

What would have happened if Luther had done what his father wanted and entered the legal profession? He may have done well in a conventional sense, but he may never have fulfilled his potential.

Erikson remarked that the real crisis in a person's life often comes in their late 20s, when they realize they are overcommitted to some path they feel is “not them,” even if they entered it enthusiastically in the first place. Their very success has put them into a hole that may require all their psychological strength to climb out of.

Erikson's broader point was that if at certain vital junctures people feel pressured to choose stagnation over growth, society at large suffers. All wise cultures acknowledge the youthful identity crisis and seek to accommodate it. Though troublesome in the short term, the new ideas and energies that are unleashed by these personal turning points can bring rejuvenation, not just to the person experiencing it but to the wider community.

Even at the height of his fame and power, Luther was still writing to his father trying to defend and justify his actions—and like his dad, in middle age and later he became something of a reactionary. The firebrand ended up living in comfort, defending Germany's system of princely government, and urging the peasants to accept their station in life. In outlook and habits, he remained a “provincial” rather than a worldly figure. He became just as his father wanted him to be: influential, well off, and married.

You would have thought this would have been the happiest time in Luther's life. In fact, it ushered in what Erikson called the mature adult crisis of “generativity,” in which people ask,” Has what I have created been worth it? Would I do it all over again, or have I wasted all those years?” Luther's first crisis was of pure identity; this one, Erikson noted, was of integrity. Despite being a “great man” Luther still had to go through this phase, as every older adult inevitably does.

Erikson's point was that the issue of identity is never completely solved. When one aspect of us achieves wholeness, there is still some larger self that is trying to make sense of our experience. Luther's life might be characterized as a succession of statements to himself of “what he is
not
.” That, in a way, is the easy half of identity formation. We are still left with the task of deciding what we
are
.

How we change our conception of ourselves over a lifetime is one of the most intriguing questions in psychology, because identity—who or what we know ourselves to be, or at least hope we are—is so fundamental.

There is a tendency to belittle someone going through an identity crisis, to emphasize the normality of it. Yet Erikson's observation of Luther could be said of all of us in the same position: “He acts as if mankind were starting all over with his own beginning as an individual… To him, history ends as well as
starts with him.” This may sound like the self-absorption of the adolescent, yet at all ages we must come to some kind of resolution about where we stand in relation to the world. Unless society does what it can to help with a successful passage through major life turning points, the cost will be not only mental illness, but also the loss of potential.

The obvious danger of psychobiography is that we can read too much into a person's childhood and its effect on their later life. However, Erikson made a convincing connection between a severe childhood and domineering father on the one hand, and the tenor of the times in which Luther lived. He showed that Luther's personal crises could not be separated from the social changes happening around him, and that the whole Reformation could be seen as Luther's personal issues being worked out on a global scale. It was Luther's own conscience, for instance, that drove him to reposition the Church as secondary to a person's direct relationship with God. And as a true believer, his insistence on faith above “good works” also reshaped Christendom.