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| Every year, Harvard clinical psychiatry professor Armand Nicholi teaches an undergraduate seminar that explores Sigmund Freud's assumptions about reality. By assigning several of Freud's works, Nicholi intends to reveal how the psychologist's answers to questions about life, meaning, happiness, and death have deeply influenced twentieth-century culture at a number of levels. Despite his forceful rejection of religion, Freud could not stop writing about the very phenomenon he supposedly found so absurd. Nicholi points out that Freud often spoke of prayer and providence and expressed a spiritual yearning. As a foil to Freud, Nicholi has students read Christian apologist C. S. Lewis, who argues that religious longings suggest the existence of God. |
Despite his lifelong claim to atheism, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) expressed a spiritual yearning in his writing, which, as Armand Nicholi argues through C. S. Lewis's work, points to the existence of God. |
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A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis (Peter Gay: Yale, 1987)
Sigmund Freud's Christian Unconscious (Paul C. Vitz: Guilford Press, 1988)
For more than twenty-five years Dr. Armand Nicholi has studied (and taught about) the worldviews of Sigmund Freud and C. S. Lewis. While they differed in assumptions and conclusions, each man reflected intently on the source of the deepest longings of the human spirit. This shared concern with yearning is, in part, the reason Nicholi has paired his study of the two thinkers. Nicholi's most recent contribution to this scholarship is a forthcoming book from Simon and Schuster, which follows the format of his Harvard course in which he compares and contrasts Freud's and Lewis's ideas. The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life presents each man's apologetic for his position on belief and non-belief in God. Included in The Question of God, which reads as a debate between the two men, are well-articulated positions on the problem of pain and suffering, the nature of love and sex, and the ultimate meaning of life and death. [Posted July 2002, ALG] |
Freud, Sigmund
Lewis, Clive Staples
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