Faith in the Workplace

Since it began 35 years ago, Harvard University's legendary course on Sigmund Freud and C. S. Lewis perennially draws students' top ratings. Some cite it as a turning point in their lives: "my most redeeming intellectual experience" … "an oasis" … "what I was starved for."

Then in 2002, from decades of probing the question of God with sharp young minds and from his own rich database, Dr. Armand Nicholi wrote the book on the ultimate parlor game. In conversational, nontheological language, he placed two of the 20th century's intellectual titans at the table …and then he stepped back.

Now The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life, pits the father of psychoanalysis and Christianity's leading apologist, both of them atheists in their 20s, regarding life's Big issues—seemingly point for point. Inevitably the two men's beliefs and rejections play out in their own lives: in certainty of purpose, pleasure in sex … fear of death. Fascinated readers draw their own conclusions.

In this High Calling interview, Dr. Nicholi discusses the Freud-Lewis face-off and responds to it. He explains why worldview matters and what difference it makes to give our minds fully and openly to the high-stakes question of what we believe.

The obvious first questions, Dr. Nicholi, are why this subject and why these men?

When I finished medical training at Harvard, I was asked to teach a course on Freud. Not having read his philosophical works, which were the more influential, I decided to teach his philosophy as the best way to learn it. Student evaluations came back saying the course was interesting but biased toward the secular worldview and that it was a strong sustained attack against the spiritual worldview. They asked why I presented no counterpoint to Freud.

So I began to think who could define and defend the spiritual worldview that Freud attacked, but could think of no one with the intellectual credentials.

When I was a surgical intern, I encountered real suffering for the first time—children with fatal illness. I was haunted by their cries and the families' pain. I thought, "How could anyone in heaven or on earth permit this suffering if they could prevent it?" Around that time, I saw a small book on a table in the hospital library titled, The Problem of Pain by C. S. Lewis, and I read it. It didn't answer the problem completely, but it was very helpful. Fast forward a few years and now I thought of Lewis as a counterpoint to Freud. I began to read his works seriously and was astounded by the parallels in Lewis' and Freud's writings. Freud would raise a question and Lewis would answer—as if they were at a podium arguing. Freud, then Lewis.

The reason for this stark parallelism was that Lewis was an atheist for the first 30 years of his life and used Freud's argument to defend his atheism. After Lewis found faith, whose arguments did he answer when defending the spiritual worldview but Freud's?

Why do you think the course affects students so strongly?

Most courses taught in college have to do with almost every aspect of our culture and universe except how you live your life. Universities, therefore, turn out people successful in their careers but failures in their lives. This course focuses on how to live life. In addition, I think students find it helpful to understand the arguments for the worldview opposite of what they embrace. Those who embrace a secular worldview understand for the first time the arguments for the spiritual worldview. Likewise believers look at arguments for the secular worldview and broaden their understanding of people they previously could never understand.

Most readers say the book is unbiased, but a few think you lean toward Lewis …

People that share Lewis' worldview almost universally say it's a balanced, fair description. But people that embrace Freud's worldview feel that it's biased. [Lewis' and Freud's] spiritual worldviews come out in how they lived their lives and how they confronted their own deaths, for example, and the differences there are pretty dramatic.

Lewis was quite despondent before [his conversion] and quite cheerful and outgoing afterward. He actually looked forward to the time when he would enter into the life that he felt every believer had waiting. Even until the end, he was cheerful and outgoing, and said, "Why shouldn't we look forward to that time without people thinking we're morbid? St. Paul actually looked forward to it."

Without those spiritual resources, we see in Freud this enormous preoccupation with death and fear of it. He was very superstitious about when he was going to die. He would check into a hotel and be given room 41; after that he was sure that he would die at 41. When he didn't die at 41, he'd come across a new phone number and be absolutely sure he'd die at the year mentioned in the number. His official biographer said when he was still young, he'd shake hands and say, "Goodbye, you may never see me again." We know in psychiatry that unless a person can resolve the problem of his death, he either denies it or becomes obsessed with it. Freud became obsessed with it.