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The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex and the Meaning of Life. By Armand J. Nicholi, Jr. New York: Free Press, 2002. Cloth. 295 p. S25.
In The Question of God, Armand Nicholi contrasts the views of C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud. Lewis in his early days held views similar to Freud. He experienced "conversion," not the type resulting from an evangelistic service. It was an intellectual experience which gave him a different outlook on life. Since Lewis lived "on both sides of the question," his Christian critiques carry more weight than we usually find in interfaith dialogues. The first section, "What Should We Believe?" opens with sketches of the two men's lives. Freud grew up in a nineteenth-century European Jewish culture. He experienced serious losses of those dear to him, later anti-Semitism, reaching a climax in 1938 when he fled Vienna to escape the Nazis. Lewis came from an Edwardian British milieu. He likewise experienced losses of those dear to him, the horrors of British public (boarding) schools, and wounds in World War I trenches. All these shaped his ideas.
Freud had a Catholic nanny who exposed him to Catholic services. There remained throughout his life a hankering after things Catholic, but also a belief that the Catholic Church was responsible for anti-Semitism. Young Lewis never accepted the Anglican beliefs, but still had a longing for something or someone he could not quite define (the German Sehnsucht comes to mind). That longing was with him in his atheistic days, and was never satisfied until he became...