Me and Martin Luther: A Mortal Grudge Against Identity Assassins

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alloplastic_adaptation

The late Harvard psychiatrist John E. Mack, M.D. placed the following George Bernard Shaw quote on the frontispiece of his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Lawrence of Arabia: A Prince of Our Disorder.  "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

I am an unreasonable man who will invest energy into attempting to change my environment rather than adapt myself to the status quo. I am certainly not a world-historical figure like Mohandas Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, or Martin Luther King, Jr., but I identify with these figures: their struggles both private and public.

In the fall of 1989, while I was employed at the D.C. law firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss and Hauer and Feld, I read a book by the psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson titled Young Man Luther. The book analyzes Luther's inner psychological struggles before he achieved historical greatness. I identified strongly with the following passage, which I quote in my dream interpretation, "The Dream of the Four Miltons."

http://dailstrug.blogspot.com/2009/10/dream-of-four-miltons.html

"In the case of great young men (and in the cases of many vital young ones of whom we should not demand that they reveal at all costs the stigmata of greatness in order to justify confusion and conflict), rods which measure consistency, inner balance, or proficiency simply do not fit the relevant dimensions. On the contrary, a case could be made for the necessity for extraordinary conflicts, at times both felt and judged to be desperate. For if some youths did not feel estranged from the compromise patterns into which their societies have settled down, if some did not force themselves almost against their own wills to insist, at the price of isolation, on finding an original way of meeting our existential problems, societies would lose an essential avenue of rejuvenation and to that rebellious expansion of human consciousness which alone can keep pace with the technological and social change. To retrace, as we are doing here, such a step of expansion involves taking account of the near downfall of the man who took it, partially in order to understand better the origin of greatness, and partially in order to acknowledge the fact that the trauma of near defeat follows a great man through life. I have already quoted Kierkegaard's statement that Martin Luther lived and acted always as if lightening were about to strike behind him. Furthermore, a great man carries the trauma of his near downfall and his mortal grudge against the near assassins of his identity into the years of his creativity and beyond, into his decline; he builds his hates and his grudges into his system as bulwarks--bulwarks which eventually make the system first rigid and finally, brittle." Erikson, E.H. Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History at 149-150 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1958).

I suppose a perceptive psychiatrist would have foreseen that any employee who identified with Martin Luther would be predisposed to wage a years-long campaign against an employer who terminated him unlawfully. But then, I've never met a truly perceptive psychiatrist.

Before terminating my job, my former employer, Akin Gump, consulted a psychiatrist about my mental state--or so Akin Gump claims.

A question the psychiatrist should have asked Akin Gump, but probably didn't: "With what historical figures does this employee identify?"