Freud vs. Lewis: Worldviews Compared

Introduction

• Dr. Armand Nikolai, Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, compares the materialist worldview of Sigmund Freud with the spiritual worldview of C.S. Lewis.

The Invitation to Speak

• A psychiatrist's tendency to speak at length is humorously highlighted.
• The task is to compare Freud's materialist worldview with Lewis's spiritual worldview.

Freud's Attack on Religion

• Freud attacked the Christian religious worldview, focusing on the New Testament documents as defended by C.S. Lewis.

Why Freud and Lewis?

• Few individuals have influenced the moral fabric of contemporary Western civilization more than Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis.
• Both had extraordinary writing ability and literary gifts.
  • Freud won the Goethe Prize for literature.
  • Lewis taught at Oxford and held the chair of Medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge University.
• Both spent a considerable portion of their lives writing about, advocating, and defending their specific worldview.
• Both wrote autobiographies and thousands of letters, revealing life experiences that influenced their choice of worldview.
• Lewis changed his worldview from militant atheist to strong believer, allowing observation of the effects of both worldviews on one life.

Laying the Groundwork: Three Questions

• What is a worldview?
• Who is Sigmund Freud?
• Who is C.S. Lewis?

What is a Worldview?

• A worldview is our philosophy of life, our attempt to make sense of our existence.
• Everyone has a worldview, either a secular version of Freud's worldview or a spiritual version of Lewis's.
• Basic Assumption:
  • The universe is all that there is and life on this planet is a matter of chance.
  • There's some kind of intelligence beyond the universe that gives the universe order and life meaning.
• Our worldview tells more about us than any other part of our personal history.

Who is Sigmund Freud?

• Freud's death was marked by significant recognition in the New York Times and Time magazine.
• Historians rank Freud's scientific contributions with those of Planck and Einstein.
• Freud's concepts permeate our language: complex, repression, projection, inhibition, neurosis, psychosis, resistance, sibling rivalry, Freudian slip, etc.
• His model of the mind is still perhaps the most developed, and used in many forms of psychotherapy.
• The 20th century is referred to as the century of Freud.
• Freud strongly advocated an atheistic worldview and waged a fierce battle against the spiritual worldview.
• Freud's philosophical writings played a significant role in the secularization of our culture.
• People turned to astronomy in the 17th century, Newtonian physics in the 18th century, Darwin in the 19th century, and Freud in the 20th century to demonstrate the conflict between science and faith.

Who is C.S. Lewis?

• Lewis's death was noted amid the coverage of John F. Kennedy's assassination.
• The New York Times reviewed Lewis's prolific life, mentioning his reputation as a brilliant scholar and his success as a writer after changing his worldview.
• Lewis won international recognition as a proponent of faith based on reason.
• During World War II, his voice was second only to Churchill's on the BBC.
• His books sell millions of copies a year, and his influence continues to grow.
• His "Chronicles of Narnia" ignite the imagination of children throughout the world.
• Lewis's atheistic past allows him to provide cogent responses to Freud's arguments against the spiritual worldview.
• Their writings possess a striking parallelism.
• If Freud serves as the primary spokesman for the materialist worldview in this century, Lewis certainly serves as the primary spokesman for the specific worldview that Freud attacks.
• Lewis knew Freud's theories; Freud may have read some of Lewis's early writings.

Freud's Worldview

• Freud referred to himself as an atheist, materialist, godless medical man, infidel, and unbeliever.
• He divided people into believers and unbelievers.
• Freud called his worldview scientific, based on the premise that knowledge comes only from the scientific method.

Freud's Attack on the Religious Worldview

• Freud systematically attacked the religious worldview.
• He said that miracles contradict sober observation, Scriptures are full of contradictions, and no intelligent person can accept religious absurdities.

Surprising Aspects of Freud's Writings

• Freud frequently quoted from the Bible.
• His letters are replete with religious words and phrases, such as "I passed my examinations today with God's help," "If God so wills," and "The good Lord above."
• He mentions a secret prayer and refers to a clergyman as "a true servant of God."
• Freud appears to be obsessed with God's existence, referring to it as "the most important question."
• Lewis, similarly, experienced contradictions as an atheist, being angry with God for not existing.

Freud's Arguments Against the Spiritual Worldview

• Argument concerning human suffering.
• The psychological argument concerning wish fulfillment.
• Freud's main argument rests on the notion that all religious ideas are rooted in deep-seated wishes and are therefore illusions.
• Freud concludes that belief in God is merely a projection of primal wishes and inner needs.
• Deep-seated wishes stem from early childhood feelings, such as a feeling of helplessness.

Lewis's Counter-Arguments

• Lewis counters Freud's wish-fulfillment argument by saying that the biblical worldview involves despair and pain and is not something one would wish for.
• This faith begins with the realization that one is in deep trouble, that one has broken the moral law and needs forgiveness and reconciliation.
• Lewis argues that the New Testament, once properly understood, is anything but wish fulfillment.
• Lewis argues that Freud's argument stems from clinical observations that a young child's feelings toward the father are always characterized by ambivalence.
• Lewis points out that the negative part of the ambivalence indicates the wish that God not exist.
• Lewis wanted no one to interfere with his life and found that atheism satisfied this deep-seated desire to be left alone.

Early Negative Feelings Toward Fathers

• The atheism of Freud and Lewis may be explained in part on the basis of early negative feelings toward their fathers.
• Both Freud and Lewis describe strong negative feelings toward their fathers when they were children.
• Freud felt closer to his mother and considered his father a failure.
• Lewis lost his mother and felt abandoned by his father.
• Both adults experienced great difficulty with authority.

Lewis's Radical Transformation

• How did Lewis, a critical, militant atheist, come to embrace a worldview so in conflict with his atheism?
• Unlike Freud, who wavered in his atheism, Lewis as an undergraduate never wavered.
• He had an intense aversion to all expressions of religiosity.
• The transforming change in his life was gradual and intellectual.

Highlights of Lewis's Transformation

• Lewis periodically experienced a sense of intense longing for something he didn't understand, which he called "joy."
• Some of his close friends rejected their materialist worldview.
• He met other faculty that he admired, especially Dyson and Tolkien, who were strong believers.
• Lewis became aware that all the authors that he most admired embraced the spiritual worldview.
• He read Chesterton's "Everlasting Man."
• One of the most militant atheists among the Oxford faculty remarked that the historical authenticity of the Gospels was surprisingly sound.
• Lewis felt the adversary closing in on him and decided to open the door to look at the evidence.
• Lewis surrendered and admitted that God was God.
• Lewis realized that this person, unlike anyone else in history, made unique claims about himself.
• He was struck by what he read and the Gospels did not contain the rich, amana, the imaginative writings of the pagan myths; they appeared to be simple eyewitness accounts of historical events by Jews obviously not familiar with the great pagan myths around them.
• He found that all of this story in the Gospels and so forth was very complex and different than what he expected it to be.

Lewis's Concept of Jesus

• As an atheist, Lewis dismissed Jesus as another moral teacher.
• As Lewis continued to read the New Testament, he began to realize that Jesus made unique claims about himself.
• Lewis points out that no great moral teacher ever claimed to be God.
• In "The Everlasting Man", a book that Lewis read, Chesterton points out that no great moral teacher ever claimed to be God—not Muhammad, or Confucius, or Plato, or Moses, or Buddha. Chesterton says not one of them ever made that claim, and the greater the man is, the less likely he is to make it.
• Lewis reflected these very thoughts many years later when he closed the chapter in his most widely read book with quote, "A man who was merely a man had said the things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic or else he would be the devil of hell. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great moral teacher. He has not left that open to us; he did not intend to."
• Perhaps part of the answer is that during his years as an atheist, Lewis describes in himself quote, "a willful blindness." He just didn't want to know.

Lewis's Experience

• On the evening of September 19, 1931, Lewis invited two close friends, Dyson and Keen, for dinner. They began discussing myth and metaphor, a discussion that Lewis would always remember as very pivotal in his life.
• A few days later, Lewis experienced the second phase in his great transition and knew when it happened but not exactly how. He was on a motorcycle heading to the zoo.

Closing Remarks

• Once Lewis made the conscious decision to open his mind, overcome his "willful blindness," and look at the evidence, he passed from the darkness of unbelief into the light of reality.

Questions and Answers

• Why is Freud called an atheist and not an agnostic?
  • Because he referred to himself as an atheist.
• Why wasn't Freud aware of the wish that God might not exist?
  • Perhaps because that would be a difficult, anxiety-provoking question.
• Lewis was aware of the potential for a corrupting agenda, and I don't see that as much in what you have reported about Freud, though I know less about him.
• Lewis realized also that one has a tendency to distort their concept of God. Lewis says that God is the great iconoclast and that our concept of him, as we come to know him, probably needs to be changed continuously, that God changes it every experience we have. We come to, I think, understand him a little better.