ABSTRACT
Erik H. Erikson was certainly the most widely known psychoanalyst in the United States during his lifetime, and his death on May 12, 1994, at the age of ninety-one, has prompted many of his former colleagues, students, and admirers to speak and write about the influence of his work on their professional and personal lives. As a psychoanalyst, Erikson does have some firm commitments on the other side of the psychology-religion equation. Erikson's inclusion of "ego processes" in his clinical model was to become the hallmark of his way of adapting psychoanalysis to the needs of his own era. Erikson argued that adult anxieties often have their origins in childhood fears that were never adequately resolved and that therefore left the child with a lasting sense of being under threat. Erikson first took up the fact that some of the beatings were inflicted by Luther's father.
