What happens when you get Freud and C.S. Lewis together?

How to view both religion and science

What happens when a psychoanalyst and Christian apologist meet? On my plane ride to Switzerland, I took a break from writing to watch Freud’s Last Session, Netflix film based on a play by the same name and the book, The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life Paperback. It is a fictional “what if” where we join two world renown figures, Dr. Sigmund Freud (Anthony Hopkins) and Professor C.S. Lewis (Matthew Goode). Hopkins played Lewis in the 1993 film, Shadowlands. Freud did meet with an Oxford don at his 20 Maresfield Gardens home before Freud’s death, but this was unspecified. Who knows if this was Lewis and what kind of conversation they had, but it’s intriguing to imagine.

Set in London, after the German invasion of Poland, Lewis responds to a correspondence to visit Freud about his book, Pilgrim’s Regress, and allegory about his conversation to Christianity. Other characters in the film include Freud’s daughter, Anna (played by Liv Lisa Fries) who was also a psychoanalyst and struggles with Freud’s codependent relationship with her. Lewis and Freud engage in a conversation about sex, God, and humanity during war and national anxiety. This will be a spoiler free talk about the intersection of these two disciplines, and a discussion of topics that people don’t usually talk about in public, but should talk about in some context.