The Trailer for "Freud's Last Session"
In 2012, I wrote some posts on C. S. Lewis as depicted in Mark St. Germain's play "Freud's Last Session" (2010). This play is based on Armand Nicholi's book The Question of God (2002), which presents the debate between Sigmund Freud and Lewis over "God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life." This book was based on a course on the Freud-Lewis debate that Nicholi had taught for 35 years at Harvard University. In 2004, PBS broadcast a four-hour series of programs based on Nicholi's book. St. Germain's play is a fictional portrayal of a conversation between Freud and Lewis at Freud's home in London on September 3, 1939, the day Great Britain declared war on Nazi Germany, and twenty days before Freud ended his life by suicide at age 83.
Now, a film version of this play has been released. St. Germain has written the screenplay with the help of Matthew Brown, the Director of the movie. In the movie, Anthony Hopkins plays Freud, and Matthew Goode plays Lewis. (Some years ago, Hopkins played the role of Lewis, while Debra Winger played Joy Gresham, in "Shadowlands," a movie about the poignant story of Lewis's marriage to Gresham and his grief over her death from cancer after only a few years of a joyful marriage.)
Although I have not yet had a chance to see the new movie, I have read the screenplay. I have been comparing the movie screenplay with St. Germain's stage play and with Nicholi's book.
One reason for my interest in this debate between Freud and Lewis is that it helps me to reexamine my claim that the natural desire for religious understanding is one of the twenty natural desires of our evolved human nature. Is that true? And if it is, does that natural desire for God give us any reason to believe that God really exists, as Lewis asserted? Or is that natural longing for God only delusional wish-fulfillment, as Freud asserted? Does an evolutionary science of religion support Lewis or Freud?
Do the book, the play, and the movie come down on one side or the other of this debate? In deciding this debate, are the biographies of the debaters more decisive than their arguments, because the biographies show which way of life is happier and more fulfilling?
Before considering the other questions, I will take up those last two question in this post.
In his book, as in his course at Harvard, Nicholi claimed that to properly assess the debate between Freud and Lewis, it was not enough to study their arguments as presented in their writings, because we needed to study their biographies. "Their arguments can never prove or disprove the existence of God. Their lives, however, offer sharp commentary on the truth, believability, and utility of their views" (5). We can then "see if their biographies--how they actually lived their lives--strengthen or weaken their arguments and tell us more than their words convey" (9).
This combination of arguments and biographies in Nicholi's book is represented dramatically in St. Germain's stage play and screenplay as a philosophical dialogue--rather like a Platonic dialogue in which we can judge both the arguments and the characters of the interlocutors.
When Nicholi's book was first published in 2002, Ken Gewertz wrote an article on the book for The Harvard Gazette. He observed: "As he does in his seminar, Nicholi avoids taking sides in the debate, but rather allows Freud and Lewis to speak for themselves. He also examines their lives to detrmine the impact of their beliefs. Ultimately, the book asks the question, which man was happier, more satisfied? Is it better to be a believer or an unbeliever?"
When Gewertz directly posed this question to Nicoli, he maintained a "spinxlike reticence"--saying that he did not take sides in the debate. "What I do is try to present an objective, dispassionate, critical assessment of both worldviews."
"Nicholi's book, however, tells another story," Gewertz insisted. Because "in response to the question of happiness, the evidence is clear: Lewis wins, hands down."
As I indicated in my previous posts on Nicholi's book, I think Gewertz was right: even though Nicholi professed to be even-handed in his presentation of the debate between Freud and Lewis, Nicholi was clearly biased in favor of Lewis, because he showed us how Lewis's conversion to Christianity led him to a life that was happier and healthier than Freud's life, which confirmed that Lewis had the better argument because he had the better life. Although it is not quite as clear as it is in the book, both the play and the movie tend to favor Lewis over Freud.
The problem with this, however, is that in selecting Freud as Lewis's opponent, Nicholi gave Lewis an unfair advantage. Nicholi could have selected a far more formidable opponent--someone like David Hume, for example--who would have been intellectually and morally superior to Freud, and who would have shown that a skeptic or atheist can live a happy and fulfilled life.
It was too easy for Nicholi to show Freud's intellectual and moral failures and thus make Lewis look good by comparison. For example, Freud explained religious belief as childish wish-fulfillment--as an expression of the child's helplessness and longing for a father-figure, so that God becomes an exalted father. And since the child's attitude to the father shows ambivalence (both love and fear), God must be both feared and loved.
But then, as Nicholi says, Lewis "astutely notes" that Freud's argument about our ambivalence in our wishes about our father and our God can work both ways: our wish that God not exist should be as strong as the wish for his existence (42-47). Lewis reports that before his conversion at age 33, he was a staunch atheist who wished that God not exist, because this satisfied Lewis's wish that he be left alone, free from any "transcendental Interferer." Freud's atheism could be explained the same way--as satisfying his wish that God not exist and as an expression of his ambivalent feelings about his father. Indeed, Freud's life-long vehemence in attacking religious belief showed an obsessive wish to be free from God's authority. Both the play and the film versions of "Freud's Last Session" depict Freud's angry struggle against God, which Freud himself described as a struggle against a "longing" for God that haunted his whole life.
Nicholi also noticed this in Freud's letters, which are full of phrases such as "if God so wills," "the good Lord," and "until after the Resurrection." Of course, we could dismiss this as a casual use of figures of speech. But then, Freud would say that even a slip of the tongue should be revealing (50-51). This comes up in both the play and the movie.
One can see here and throughout Nicholi's book the signs of Nicholi's background as a physician and psychiatrist. He was a clinical psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital. His clinical work and research concentrated on studying the emotional development of children and young adults. As part of that work, he studied the psychology of religious conversion among young people, including students at Harvard. He first discovered Lewis when he was a medical intern, and he read Lewis's The Problem of Pain with the hope that this would help him deal with the suffering he was seeing in his patients. That would explain his interest in teaching a course on Freud and Lewis for Harvard students.
In his book, Nicholi repeatedly cited the psychiatric and medical research--conducted by himself and others--on the psychological effects of religious conversion (46-47, 52-53, 80, 92-94, 114-15, 141-43, 155-59, 251-52). He reported that this research denied Freud's claim that religious believers are delusional and emotionally ill and confirmed Lewis's claim that religious believers are generally happy and healthy human beings.
In 1974, Nicholi published an article in the American Journal of Psychiatry that reported his study of 17 Harvard undergraduates who had experienced a religious conversion. He interviewed these students and also people who had known them before and after their conversion. He found that conversion had enhanced rather than impaired their "functioning." Each of them showed "a marked improvement in ego functioning, a radical change in life style with an abrupt halt in the use of drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes; improved impulse control, with adoption of a strict sexual code demanding chastity or marriage with fidelity; improved academic performance; enhanced self-image and greater access to inner feelings; an increased capacity for establishing close, satisfying relationships; improved communication with parents, though most parents at first expressed some degree of alarm over the student's rather sudden, intense religious interest; a positive change in affect, with lessening of 'existential despair'; and a decrease in preoccupation with the passage of time and apprehension over death" (80).
Nicholi found that Lewis showed the same beneficial consequences from his conversion: "both Lewis and each of the students, after their conversion, found their new faith enhanced their functioning. They reported positive changes in their relationships, their image of themselves, their temperament, and their productivity. People who knew Lewis and those who knew the students before and after their transition confirmed these changes" (94). This evidence denies Freud's claim that religious believers suffer from "obsessional neurosis" or "hallucinatory psychosis." "If Freud analyzed Lewis," Nicholi argued, "the evidence suggests that he would not have dismissed him as dysfunctional. . . . Freud would have observed that the transition Lewis experienced matured him emotionally and did not impair, but enhanced, his functioning."
In contrast to Lewis, Nicholi observed, Freud was an arrogant and mean-spirited man who argued violently with most of his friends and professional colleagues. He thought most human beings were despicable. In one letter, he wrote: "I have found little that is 'good' about human beings on the whole. In may experience, most of them are trash" (181).
Freud often fell into deep bouts of depression and despair. He found little joy in life. And he feared death. To escape the pain of his cancer at the end of his life, he committed suicide.
Remarkably, in contrast to his reputation for teaching sexual freedom, Freud's sex life was very limited. He did not marry until he was 30, and apparently he had no sexual experience before marriage. With his wife Martha, he had six children in eight years. But he had long periods during which, as he reported in a letter to a friend, "we are now living in abstinence." At the age of 39, after the birth of his last child, Anna, Freud stopped all sexual relations with his wife permanently. He also warned people about the dangers of masturbation because it caused mental illness.
Freud was very close to his daughter Anna, who followed the lead of her father in becoming a psychoanalyst. When Freud's friend Ernest Jones suggested that he was interested in a personal relationship with Anna, Freud told him to stay away, and that Anna had agreed not to consider marriage without Freud's approval. Anna never did marry.
Nicholi had visited Anna's clinic in London. In talking with her secretary Gina Bon, he once asked her why Anna had never married. She answered sternly, "Don't ever ask that question."
In St. Germain's play and movie, Lewis notices Freud's seemingly incestuous feeling for Anna. And when Lewis asks Freud about this, Freud refuses to talk about it. Lewis also notices Anna's apparently lesbian partnership with Dorothy Burlingham.
In the movie, Lewis saw this photograph of Freud and Anna in Freud's office, and he noticed that this could be easily mistaken for a young woman with her suitor.
In the play and the movie, after Lewis has questioned Freud about his relationship with Anna, Freud responds by questioning Lewis about why he has never married and about his relationship with the older woman living with him. This comes up briefly in the play, and it becomes a big part of the movie.
When Lewis went to France as a young soldier in World War One, he became friends with Edward "Paddy" Moore; and the two of them made a promise to one another that if one of them was killed, the other would take care of his parent. Paddy was killed. And Lewis kept his promise: he moved in with Paddy's mother--Janie Moore--and her daughter Maureen. Lewis was 20 years old, and Janie was 46. Lewis's mother had died when he was 9, and he spoke of Mrs. Moore as his surrogate mother. But Lewis and Mrs. Moore also became lovers.
Nicholi dismisses this story in one sentence: "Some biographers have speculated that Lewis and Mrs. Moore wee lovers, but the evidence weighs against it" (34). But now the evidence strongly favors this story. Walter Hooper worked briefly as a secretary for Lewis, and after Lewis's death in 1963, Hooper devoted his life to writing about Lewis and editing his papers and letters. In an interview that was published after Hooper's death in 2020, he said that Owen Barfield, one of Lewis's closest friends, had reported that Lewis had told Barfield that he had in fact been Janie's lover, but that after Lewis's conversion, he had broken off their sexual affair.
Lewis then remained chaste until he became friends with Joy Davidman Gresham in 1952 and then married her in 1956. She became ill with cancer shortly after their marriage. She recovered for a few years, but then died in 1960. Joy and Lewis enjoyed three years and four months of a deeply loving marriage. In letters, Joy and Lewis spoke openly about their sexual happiness. Lewis said that they "feasted on love; every mode of it," so that "no cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied" (158).
Nicholi concludes that Lewis enjoyed a more active and satisfying sexual life than did Freud, because after Lewis's conversion, he lived by the Christian standard of sexual love expressed only in a faithful marriage, so that he and his wife could love one another as persons rather than sexual objects.
Of course, Lewis's marriage cannot come up in St. Germain's play and movie, where the story does not extend beyond 1939.
All of this does, I think, support Nicholi's conclusion that Lewis's life as a Christian was morally and intellectually superior to Freud's life as an atheist. But, again, as I said at the beginning, this fails to consider the possibility that there are better examples than Freud of how atheists or skeptics might live good lives.
I have written about David Hume as one famous example of a philosophical skeptic who seemed to live a happy and flourishing life. When his friend Adam Smith described Hume as "both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit," this got Smith into trouble with the many Christians who wanted to hear that Hume's fatal illness during the last year of his life had shaken him with the fear of death and perhaps forced him to plead with God for forgiveness as he faced the prospect of eternal damnation.
Now, I understand that St. Germain could not have added Hume to his play to meet with Freud and Lewis, because the fictional meeting occurs on September 3, 1939, and Hume had died in 1776! But he could have added a contemporary of Freud and Lewis--Edward Westermarck--the Finnish philosopher and sociologist who was a Humean skeptic and ethical subjectivist. So, Westermarck could have defended the Humean position as an alternative to both Freud and Lewis.
Coincidentally, Westermarck died in Finland on September 3, 1939! But St. Germain could have imagined Westermarck being in London on that day just before his death.
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