|A Reflection on Lewis and Freud |
|Rel 225 |
| |
|Crystal Lynn Purser |
|Fall 2008 |
Before being assigned to read The Question of God: CS Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life by Dr. Armand Nicholi, Jr, I knew very little about Sigmund Freud and his work. I basically knew his views on mothers and fathers being the root of most psychological problems, and I knew the cultural meaning of a “Freudian slip”. My expectations from this book were to come away with a better view of Freud’s ideas and to understand how they lined up with Lewis’ and how they compared to each other. While I believe the book is extremely successful in juxtaposing the two men’s ideologies, I think it also tends to be very biased toward Lewis and his ideas, including Christianity in general, as superior. I do not feel as though the novel is an equal comparison; it is more a view of Freud’s failures in light of Lewis’ successes.
I greatly appreciated the presence of a background for each man because I feel as though a person’s background, especially in the case of Freud and Lewis, so greatly impacts their views that it is necessary to know where they came from. In the case of Freud and Lewis, it is interesting to know the relationships between them and their mothers. Lewis, of course, I already knew had lost his...