A new movie, “Freud’s Last Session,” imagines a dialogue—and a friendship—between the famed psychologist and C.S. Lewis.
Sigmund Freud and C. S. Lewis both lived in England when Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared war on Germany in 1939. Freud had recently left Nazi-controlled Austria with his family and was staying in London. Lewis, then at Oxford, was coming to prominence as a writer and theologian with the publication of The Pilgrim’s Regress and Out of the Silent Planet.
No record exists of the two men having ever met. But what if they had?
A new film, Freud’s Last Session—directed by Matthew Brown, adapted from a play of the same name by Mark St. Germain, and in select theaters beginning Friday, December 22—imagines a hypothetical house call by the Oxford don to the 83-year-old father of psychoanalysis. Anthony Hopkins (who also played Lewis in Shadowlands) brings a complex depth to Freud in his last weeks of life, and Matthew Goode (of Downton Abbey and The Imitation Game) is an earnest, younger Lewis who feels a bit awkward at having satirized Freud in Pilgrim’s Regress.
Soon, though, two of the greatest minds of the 20th century are debating everything from the existence of God to the origin of evil to the meaning of suffering. It’s a heavyweight matchup, and Freud’s Last Session offers ringside seats. One brief exchange gives the sense of the debate:
Freud: Your God who created good, or whatever that is, he must have also created the bad, the evil. He allowed Lucifer to live; he let him flourish. But logically he should have destroyed him. Am I correct? Think about it.Lewis: God gave Lucifer free will, which is the only thing that makes goodness possible. A world filled with choice-less creatures is a world of machines. It’s men, not God, who created prisons and slavery and—bombs. …