Freud and History

I'm reading Erik Erikson's Young Man Luther, and his thesis is apparently that every one has an identity crisis, and certain people--great men--emerge from it, translating whatever particular family oppression they experienced into a public arena: "Millions of boys," he writes, " face these problems and solve them in some way or another . . . .Now and again, however, an individual is called upon . . .to lift his individual patienthood to the level of a universal one and to try to solve for all what he could not solve for himself alone" (67). So if Dad ignores you or beats the hell out of you, and Mom is nuts or smothers you, certain people turn this conflict into everyone's problem: thus the engine of history, family dramas made into international issues. Frankly I don't know. Every once in a while he says something interesting--something that resonates--but it's all so pat, playing the same family drama over and over, occasionally replayed in the political world. Luther rebelled against his upwardly mobile Dad (and tried to be good as a monk), then transformed his rebellion into a global one against the Roman Catholic Church. But maybe the Church was a corrupt institution and he had just had it with it? Why couldn't that be a simpler explanation?