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Many schools of psychology have come and gone since Freud died. And yet he has a cultural legacy. What is that legacy?

The most important part of Freud's legacy is his influence on our language. We use terms—ego, repression, projection, neurosis, sibling rivalry, and Freudian slip—without realizing their source. In addition, his theories influence how we interpret human behavior—in history, literary criticism, biography, sociology, medicine, education, and ethics. We now take for granted that early life experiences influence how we think and feel and behave as adults. For example, before Freud, we had little awareness of the traumatic effects of child sexual abuse. Now we read of such cases every day. His influence is so profound, historians refer to the 20th century as "the century of Freud."

Would Lewis have agreed that childhood experiences influence us?

Yes. He was acutely aware of the influence of his early childhood, especially his mother's death when he was 9 years old. Lewis never fully recovered. In his autobiography, he writes extensively about both the positive and negative early experiences that shaped his life.

You write that "the early life experiences show striking parallelism." If those experiences of love and loss were so similar, why did these men turn out so different?

Until Lewis came to a personal faith, they were very much alike—gifted intellectually, introspective, highly critical and wary of others, clinically depressed, pessimistic, gloomy and hostile toward their fathers and toward all authority—especially to the notion of an Ultimate Authority, etc. Then, in his early 30s, Lewis had a conversion experience that transformed his life.

You've done empirical research on the religious conversions of university students. What did you learn from comparing the students' conversions with Lewis's?

Both Lewis and the students observed in believers some quality that was missing in their own lives. Lewis observed this in other Oxford faculty members and in the lives of some of the great writers he admired. The students observed this in some of their peers who possessed a strong faith. Both Lewis and the students made a conscious effort to open their minds and look at the evidence. Lewis began reading the New Testament in Greek and the students attended Bible study groups on campus. Both Lewis and the students came to faith in the context of a modern, liberal university where the climate tends to be hostile. The spiritual worldview is often thought to be only for the ignorant masses, a psychological crutch that never works. Some consider it, as did Freud, an expression of pathology.

But Lewis turned out to be better adjusted as a result.

Both Lewis and the students functioned more effectively after their conversion experience. The students who underwent what they called a "religious conversion" reported a radical change in lifestyle—an abrupt halt in the use of drugs, an enhanced self-image, a more forgiving spirit toward others and toward themselves, better control of impulses, an increased capacity for establishing "close, satisfying relationships," a marked change in their mood or affect, and a lessening of what they referred to as "existential despair."

Friends who knew Lewis before and after his conversion noted many of the same changes in him. The quality of his relationships changed. He became more outgoing. He said his conversion was the beginning of his turning outward. He had a new evaluation of people—he realized every human being would live forever, long after our institutions, governments, and nations are long gone—and therefore are of infinitely more value.

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April 22 2002, Vol. 46, No. 5