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Monday September 20, 2004 Volume VI Number 38

In England, during and after World War II, C.S. Lewis was so popular a radio voice that only Winston Churchill was more recognizable by the average Brit.  He wrote extensively.  His popular books dealt with the issues of belief.  As a young man, he won a scholarship to Oxford.  He determined to write poetry, poetry that would be immortalized and remembered alongside the luminaries of great literature.  He pursued in earnest the discipline of literary criticism, and early on his insights were published and met with broad acclaim.  He was a thinker.  Like many of his classmates and professors, he was also a staunch atheist.  For his generation virtually every academic discipline was influenced by the writings of Sigmund Freud.

Dr. Armand Nicholi, a physician and psychiatrist and a graduate of Harvard Medical School and later a professor there, observed the pain and suffering from illness in his patients every day.  He learned to detach himself professionally - this “skill” became an essential part of the curriculum for young students.  As a health care provider, one is debilitated and ineffective if one becomes personally involved with the patient.  One must engage the illness, not the person infected by it.  Otherwise, you will be personally drawn into the pain and suffering yourself, and lose sight of the cure.  Your diagnoses and therapies will be tainted.  But Dr. Nicholi never learned this lesson.  He could not treat the disease without treating the patient.  Consequently, he was plagued by philosophical questions – what is the meaning of suffering?  Why do good people who do all the right things find themselves in pain like all the rest?  Do people of faith process illness differently than those who embrace no faith at all?  What is the real value of religion in the sickroom?  Is it merely illusion – or is it rooted in a source that has intellectual validity?

In the midst of these questions early in his career, Nicholi, a professional schooled in the philosophy of Freud (who believed religion to be based solely on childish illusions of the world, fantasies and conflicts of the ego with mother and father and sex drives and repression and projections), himself an atheist, picked up the copy of a paperback book sitting on the nightstand in a patient’s room next to an empty sickbed.  He took it home and read it.  It was the first real defense of religion that made sense to him.  It was C.S. Lewis’, The Problem of Pain.

It happened in the late sixties.  The good doctor became a student of Lewis, reading everything he could find about the Oxford literary critic and professor of literature at Magdalene College.  He came to understand that Lewis was as influential a defender of faith as Freud had been a debunker of it.

Dr. Armand Nicholi began to see that everyone has what he learned to call a World View.  Everyone, knowing it or not, perceives the world through a set of assumptions that informs just about everything.  Your world view will affect your life choices.  It will give you a moral framework.  It will determine where you associate, whom you will marry, where you will live, how your career unfolds, what you read, how you process life.  And when pain and suffering invade, your world view will be the filter through which your coping mechanisms will respond.

Nicholi was driven back into the literature.  He became fascinated by the comparisons and contrasts between Freud and Lewis.  Both of them wrote extensively about religion, death, faith, meaning, God, and wholeness.  Freud never wavered in his atheism.  While Lewis began as a convinced atheist, he converted to a life of faith in his early thirties.  Both authors had a profound affect on society and culture through their work.  Both of them operated out of a world view, Nicholi found. 

Two very different world views.

One the world view of a scientific rationalist, a materialist, an empiricist, an unbeliever.  There is no God.  All that exists is the world we can see, touch and feel.  The other the world view of a theist, a revelationist, a supernaturalist, a believer.  There is a God.  There is more to the world than what we can see and touch and feel.

Nicholi began discussions with his students and colleagues.  He found nearly universal fascination with the subject.  He called it – “The Question of God.”   Soon, he developed an entire course, which he began to teach undergraduates at the college.  To this day, it’s one of Harvard’s most popular courses, with a waiting list every semester.

Freud and Lewis.  What an interesting juxtaposition of thinkers.  Both obsessed with the question of God.

Think about it.  The God question lingers in the heart of every person.  Some take it seriously.  Many do not.

Remember - this is not the religion question.  That’s different.  This is the God question.

In 2002, Nicholi produced a book which is a summary of course lectures and lots of quotes from the original musings of the two thinkers.  PBS picked it up, and produced a four hour documentary/conversation using the same name – “The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life.”  The first of two segments aired this week.

Featured are several scholars representing various perspectives on the God question.  Dr. Nicholi, the Harvard psychiatrist and professor who authored the book, chairs the meeting.  As facilitator, he leads the participants through a discussion of the source material from Freud and Lewis.  Included are a Jungian analyst, another Harvard physician, a scientist, a journalist and an attorney.

Freud’s first book on the interpretation of dreams was his initial attempt to explain his theory of the unconscious.  He believed that the conscious mind filtered out motivations, urges, desires and drives lurking beneath the surface of comprehension – and he theorized that the most apparent access point to those powerful dynamics affecting behavior was the interpretation of dreams.  He spent years analyzing his own dreams, and then compiled his findings into a scholarly text.  The book by that title (Interpretation of Dreams) was published about the turn of the nineteenth century in Vienna.  It was a bomb.  No one was interested – except for a collection of other psychiatrists.  A small group that included Carl Jung (who quickly became a Freudian protégé), was fascinated by Freud’s thesis and formed the first psychoanalytic association.  Their work and collective writings would change the world.

In a lecture at Southern Methodist University, Dr. Nicholi talked about Freud’s impact –

His ideas pervade several disciplines including medicine, literature, sociology, anthropology, history, and law. How we interpret human behavior in law and literary criticism is strongly influenced by his theories. His concepts so permeate our language that we use terms like repression, complex, projection, narcissism, Freudian slip, and sibling rivalry without realizing their origin.  Because of the unmistakable impact of his thought on our culture, scholars refer to this century as the "century of Freud."

Freud was a naturalist.  He believed that religion was the projection of a childhood wish.  It is born out of the Oedipus complex (from Greek mythology) which is the conflict of early childhood as a youngster gets confused about his affections for his father and mother and must repress his impulses and transfers those affections to an imaginary god (the celestial parent).  In this sense, for Freud, religion is a neurosis (i.e., a mild psychiatric disorder).  Wholeness requires, then, the affirmation that there is no god, there is no after-life, no ultimate purpose or meaning.  It may take years of analysis to accomplish this liberation – but it is the essence of maturity.

This foundational world view became the bedrock of secularism.

Enter Lewis.  C.S. Lewis entered Oxford in the 1930s.  He, and most of his classmates, accepted this Freudian perspective as academic orthodoxy.  Lewis considered himself a sophisticated scholar.  Childish notions of the myths of religion were discarded in the library of Magdelene College at Oxford.

But something happened to Lewis as he spent hours reading the classics.  He found a quality of harmony and contentment in the writings of believers.  There was an emptiness and despair in the literature of his atheist counterparts.  Authors like Pascal, Tolstoy and Augustine who affirmed God drew him in – not that they missed the complexities or the ambiguities.  But there was an overriding element of what he came to simply call joy.  He described it with clarity and imagination in his classic early work – Surprise by Joy.

It was this discovery that made him rethink his presuppositions about the existence of God.  Holy delight came to him.  A great void filled up.  Water in the dessert.  He knelt beside his bed and welcomed God with a bold acknowledgement of his existence.

Christianity would come later for Lewis.  But the first step was to acknowledge that the order and design that is undeniable in the universe betray the existence of the Master Designer.

He declared – “I believe in the existence of God with as much certainty as I believe that the sun will rise.  It is not simply the appearance of the sun over the horizon in the morning that affirms my belief; it is more than that.  You see - because the sun rises, I can with a sense of wonder, behold everything else.”

Indeed.

* * * * * * *

It’s Monday morning.  You are a leader.

You have a world view.  According to Dr. Armand Nicholi, it falls into one of two categories.  Either you reject the notion of a world that transcends the material as did Freud or you embrace that world as did Lewis.  Either God is or God isn’t.

Your basic assumptions about the universe and your presuppositions about it will have a profound effect on just about everything.

If you see the PBS series (and I recommend it), you may not know where Nicholi lands.  In his Harvard course and in the PBS special, he works hard to maintain neutrality.  He believes his students will be more engaged if the professor keeps his own cards close to his chest.  But if you read the book, you’ll know: Nicholi clearly prefers Lewis over Freud.

The good psychiatrist crossed over himself.

Me too.

How about you?

Posted in Valley Center, California

© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2004

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