Erikson's Contribution Toward Understanding Religion

I have selected three subject areas to illustrate the contribution Erik Erikson has made toward understanding the nature and function of religion. The first has to do with his concentration on the biographies of religious leaders, especially those that also qualify as intriguing personalities. Of course, one thinks here of Erikson's (1958) monumental study Young Man Luther, the book in which he exercised the analytical and interpretive methods of “psychohistory” to come to terms with the life of the Protestant Reformer. Subsequently, Erikson (1969) published a companion volume, though rooted in another time and place, Gandhi's Truth, which carried the same interpretive techniques forward. Along the way, there were numerous additional religious personages to whom Erikson turned his attention. When he explained a bit about why these books had the tone and temperament they had, he said, “but you have to remember where we [always Joan was included] were when we wrote them.” Some of the Gandhi material was composed in