After reading a little about Freud and Lewis's biographies, it's easy to see the parallelism's in both of their lives. Both suffered great losses early in their childhoods and suffered in their relationships to their fathers. Both possessed what Nicholi calls "intellectual gifts" that foreshadowed the impact they would have as adults. Even though they both received instruction in faith early on, they both threw it away after reading and learning from people they looked up to. Freud's influences included Feurbach and the scientists he studied with in medical school and Lewis by the teachers who gave him the impression, "religious ideas were sheer illusion...a kind of endemic nonsense."
What strikes me the most is how both Freud and Lewis, at least initially, embraced atheism because of a deep-seated anger due to their circumstances. In my own experience, I hear this come up a lot when talking with non-believers: "How could an all-powerful and benevolent God allow suffering to happen?" Freud and Lewis debate this in Chapter 8.
Nevertheless, Freud continued on in his atheism, while Lewis rejected it and embraced the "very view he once thought nonsense."
Chapter 2: The Creator
Blessings,
Joe
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