Word: freuded
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...Freud and Lewis, despite their many differences, share striking similarities. Lewis went through an atheistic period in his young adulthood—and justified much of it based on Freud’s philosophical writings. Although primarily involved in clinical work, Freud is considered the father of the “new literary criticism” that Lewis might have studied and used in his teachings at Oxford...
...presenting the thinkers’ responses to the questions he poses, Nicholi molds their separate work into something of a dialogue. For instance, in his chapter on pain, he starts with the separate “painful” experiences of Freud and Lewis—for Freud, a combination of anti-semitic responses to his work, occasional bouts of depression and mouth cancer, and for Lewis, numerous deaths of family and friends and problems in his career. Both men seem equally unprepared to deal with the greatness of human suffering; Freud never seems to resolve the meaning...
...what he termed “a rather special sort of ‘No answer’”—that somehow gave him the ability to “endure with patience and hope,” in Nicholi’s words. Freud, by contrast, never found such contentment, which served as part of the basis for his atheism and his sense of “resignation.” Nicholi writes, “The suffering in his own life and the lives of those he loved, for him, ruled out the notion...
...solve the most largest questions in a mere 244 pages, runs the risk of feeling contrived. From time to time, for example, Nicholi attempts to make the comparisons and contrasts too clear. In the biographical background of the first chapter, he writes, “Little did she [Amalia Freud] realize that her child [Sigmund Freud] would someday be listed among the most influential scientists in history,” and a few pages later, he says of Lewis, “Little did they realize the child would someday become a brilliant scholar, a celebrated author?...
This need to place everything in exact opposition—Freud asks, Lewis answers, Freud responds, Lewis asks again—is pardoxically the book’s great strength and its weakness. Evidence is presented, sides are made—but all too neatly, for sometimes it is some hybrid or synthesis of the two sides that provides the most fulfilling and complete solution. A question which Freud may answer well, Lewis may not, and vice versa. We cannot help but feel somewhat unsatisfied by the book’s refusal to pin down a single...