Martin Luther and Mother issues.

      In my Psychology of Religion course, we are reading a book called 'Young Man Luther' by Erik Erikson (Very good book, I highly recommend it). The book is a psychoanalytical approach and interpretation of the man Martin Luther, the founder of Lutheranism and the spark that ignited Protestantism, and his life. One quote made me think of this class. Erikson was talking about Luther's Childhood and how both his father and mother used to beat him and how his father also beat his mother.
      "The Roman concepts of law in [Luther's Father's] time helped to extend the concept of property so that fatherhood took on the connotation of an ownership of wife and children. The double role of mother as one of powerless victim to the father's brutality and also as one of his dutiful assistants in meting out punishment to the children may well account for a peculiar split in the mother image. The mother was perhaps only cruel because she had to be, but the father because he wanted to be." (70)
      This brings up many questions in my mind, such as, should the mother be responsible for beating the child when she might have been forced to in order to preserve her own being? In this role, did the dual nature of mother and servant impact the woman's children in any negative way? What kind of stress might a mother who is in this role be under I really thought that it might be interesting to look at this dual role less from a philosophical standpoint, and more from a psychological standpoint and the kind of harm that not only affects the woman, but the child.