America’s First Psychobiographer: Preserved Smith and His Insights on Luther

America’s first psychobiographer was Preserved Smith (1880-1941), carrying on a family tradition of scholarly iconoclasm when he embraced psychoanalysis and applied it to the examination of Martin Luther. This article will examine both this little-known psychobiographer and the pioneering work he did on Martin Luther to bring them to psychohistorians in the 21^st century.

Smith was a descendant of 17^th-century American settlers and the son of Henry Preserved Smith (1847-1927), a distinguished Old Testament scholar and Presbyterian minister who defended, at the risk of his own career, the teaching of biblical Higher Criticism in American seminaries (H. P. Smith, 1926, see the attached references for full citations). The elder Smith had studied extensively in Germany and the Middle East. The son would say that he owed to his father “much both of the inspiration to follow and of the means to pursue a scholar’s career” (Smith, 1920, p. vi).

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Preserved Smith brought to his task his reputation as a noted historian of the Reformation (Smith, 1907, 1911, 1913b), when he published a short but highly significant essay on Martin Luther (1913a), the very first psychoanalytic study of a major historical figure to appear in the United States. He applied a thorough knowledge of Freudian literature to his probably unsurpassed familiarity with the sources of Reformation history as he sought to resolve important problems in Luther’s personality: the religious reformer’s early “obsession with the devil,” and the “part played in his growth by the idea of concupiscence” (Smith, 1913a).

This scholar’s historical grounding was in sharp contrast to backgrounds of most of the early practitioners of psychoanalysis applied to historical materials. They were clinicians and others, mostly in Freud’s circle, with medical and other non-historical training. These self-taught amateurs commonly turned to historical figures to apply their new psychoanalytic knowledge and test various theories. This was sometimes a way of avoiding discussion of their easily identifiable patients in the course of whose treatment they had gained their insights or developed their speculations—theories could more safely be applied to long-dead rather than living individuals. This was a useful technique of non-disclosure in the close-knit, Vienna psychoanalytical community in this post-Victorian era. In contrast, Smith came to his subject not with a theory to justify by finding the corresponding facts, but with an already firm grounding in history.

Martin Luther (1483-1546) was a wonderful subject for a variety of reasons. First, as the second most written-about historical individual at the time, there was a large potential audience (Smith, 1911, p. viii). (Since the first is not mentioned by name, it is unclear if Smith judged Napoleon or Christ to be the most written about historical personage.) Second, in the founder of Protestantism, Smith had all of the proper ingredients for a path-breaking study, starting with a

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massive historical record with which to work comprised of Luther’s writings, sermons, correspondence, and recorded conversion. A dozen of Luther’s followers recorded the words he spoke at the table while his wife and women of the household served food (Smith, 1907, p. 38). The collected works of Martin Luther include his Table Talk.

The advantage of Table Talk and Luther’s letters for psychoanalytic study is that they do not represent the polished, defensive argumentation typical of modern authors that do not want to reveal their personal motivations and conflicts in the midst of disputation or scholarship. Fortunately, Martin Luther wrote in the pre-Freudian world, where one could innocently speak without the awareness of self-revelation that makes many modern intellectuals highly guarded. Although he was among the best-read men of his age, he used the coarse language of the 16^th century—only to be found in the “lowest bar-rooms” of 1911 according to his psychobiographer (Smith, 1911, p. 321). Luther spoke his mind freely in the manner of the ordinary people of his age, and was noted for “a hot temper and almost unbridled violence of language” (Smith, 1913a, p. 362). The pattern of his childhood and the drama of his conversion experience were also ready-made for psychological interpretation. In publishing The Life and Letters of Martin Luther (1911), Professor Smith sought to reveal “him as a great character rather than as a great theologian,” pointing out that his self-revelation goes well beyond that of Cellini, Pepys, or Rousseau—that it is unparalleled. He rightfully saw the body of his writings as “his unconscious autobiography” (Smith, 1911, p. 9).

Although there were indications of his psychological interest in his three earlier studies, these were extended and systematized in his 1913 article, “Luther’s Early Development in the Light of Psycho-Analysis,” the first significant study of an historical personage by an American. The Reformation historian starts by noting the development of new

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psychological knowledge, acknowledging the importance of personality, and assuring the reader that there is no desire to denigrate “the radiant.” He goes on to discuss Luther’s family background, childhood, unconscious sexual desires, psychoanalytic diagnoses, mood swings, obsession with the devil, conversion experience, relationship with his confessor, and so much more.

Martin Luther had a most unhappy childhood. His reminiscences are of being beaten by his father, sometimes by his mother, and the most troubling of “spiritual terrors” (Smith, 1913a, p. 362). Hans Luther was a hard, self-made man who pulled himself out of the peasantry and wanted his eldest and most talented son, Martin, to help him in business by becoming a lawyer. He drank in excess to the point of intoxication, once whipping Martin “so severely that the latter hated him for it and fled from him for a season” (p. 362). Although Martin appears not to have borne any lasting resentment towards his mother, he described her beating him until he was bloody simply for stealing a nut. His resentment for this corporal punishment was focused on his father rather than his mother. Preserved Smith associates Luther with “jealousy and hatred of the father,” feelings he sees as getting “transferred to other adult males” (Smith, 1913a, pp. 362-363). On the other hand, he argues for Luther being fascinated with issues of mother-son incest. There is an elegance of Smith’s depiction of the childhood when he writes “most adults, [are] cut off from their infancy by a curtain of amnesia” (Smith, 1913a, p. 362).

A strength of the points made by Smith are that they are footnoted to the original German, which is a reminder that this scholar spent considerable time studying Luther and historical methodology in Europe at a time when history was becoming much more rigorous and “scientific.” As someone trained in psychoanalysis who works to avoid using technical terminology, the 2010 writer of these words is less enamored

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of Smith’s finding Luther to be “a thoroughly typical example of the neurotic, quasi-hysterical sequence of an infantile sex complex,” nor does he appear to present adequate evidence for the claim. Smith thought “that Sigismund Freud and his school could hardly have found a better example to illustrate the sounder part of their theory [of the sexual life of the child] than him” (Smith, 1913a, p. 362).

Demonology was central to Luther’s belief system. He reported his mother struggling with a witch who could cause a child to cry himself to death (Smith, 1913a, p. 363), raising questions regarding her ability to separate from her first son, although Smith does not note this. Luther reports disputing with the devil on a nightly basis, stating that the demons gave him night sweats and terrors so “that my hardest battles have been in bed.” Smith sees the devil as representing Luther’s father (Smith, 1913a, p. 365) and at other points quotes him as viewing Christ as the devil (Smith, 1913a, p. 373). Luther’s obsession with the devil would ultimately result in the writing of the book The Devil with/in Martin Luther: A Theological Examination (in German, 1931).

Professor Smith saw Luther as having struggled with masturbation—although in the pre-WWI period he did not directly state this, just as he failed to explicitly state that Luther fought the devil with feces and flatulence. He casts an interesting light on Luther’s life-changing decision in a thunderstorm to leave law school and become an Augustinian monk. Also, he argues that the young monk’s confessor, John von Staupitz, played a key role in helping him to sublimate some of his conflicts in scholarship and teaching (Smith, 1913a, p. 376).

Preserved Smith’s pioneer work received mixed reviews. It was condemned in the Historische Zeitschrift and in the Archiv für Reformationsqeschichte and even attracted,

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without being named, the scorn of Lucien Febvre (1928, p. 27), though in certain circles his insights were better appreciated (Smith, 1914). While Smith led the way for our discipline in America by showing the viability of the founder of Protestantism as a source for our field, 45 years later it was Young Man Luther (1958) that brought the field of applied psychoanalysis—psychohistory—to public notice. In it, Erik Erikson credited Professor Smith’s contribution as “brilliant,” but disagreed sharply with many elements of his work and claimed that psychoanalysis was like a “foreign body” in Smith’s thinking (Erikson, pp. 28-29).

We view his contributions more positively. Elizabeth Marvick believed that his subsequent magisterial works of historical synthesis, The Age of the Reformation (1920) and A History of Modern Culture (1930-1934), show that Smith, uniquely among American historians of his time, had integrated psychoanalytic hypotheses into his perspectives. His legacy continued through his family when his daughter, Priscilla Robertson, contributed the chapter, “The Home as Nest: Middle Class Childhood in Nineteenth Century Europe,” to the 1974 psychohistorical book, The History of Childhood.

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