Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History

Erikson's study of the youth of Martin Luther, which its publisher presents as a psychobiography applying his ideas on human development and the identity crisis to the leading figure of the Protestant Reformation. It reads Luther's years of crisis in the monastery as a prolonged identity crisis and as a psychosocial moratorium, a period in which binding adult commitments are put off. It argues that the way Luther resolved this personal crisis became a turning point in the religious history of his age. By reading a leader's inner crisis together with the historical crisis of his time, the book became a founding work of psychohistory and psychobiography.