Psychoanalysis Psycho

Erik Erikson writes: "We have also indicated the significance of the choice of the buttocks as the preferred place for coporeal punishment; a safe place physiologically, but emotionally dangerous, since punishment aggravates the significance of this general area as a battlefield of parental and infantile wills. The fear that his parents and teachers might ever completely subject him by dominating this area and this gaining power over his will may have provided some of the dynamite in that delayed time bomb of Martin's rebellion, and may account for the excessiveness with which Luther, to the end, expressed an almost paranoid definace, alternating with a depressed conception of himself" (231). This from Young Man Luther. So the Reformtion--indeed, the shift to the individual conscience (and thus, according to Weber, capitalism)--is largely connected to the fact that Luther's parents spanked him? It's at moments like this when psychoanalysis becomes a parody of itself.