The Protagonists: Question of God

Chapter 1 in "The Question of God" starts out with biographies on the lives of Freud and Lewis. It's interesting to read about two men from two totally different backgrounds, whom, early on in their lives refused the notion of a supreme being, yet one continued on in his atheism, while the other converted.

Nicholi begins by talking about Freud, who's father had been educated as an Orthodox Jew. Freud wrote "My familiarity with the Bible story (at a time almost before I had learnt the art of reading) had, as I recognized much later, an enduring effect upon the direction of my interest." Freud, as the books points out, naturally associated his spiritual worldview with his father, whom, although had given up many Jewish practices, would regularly read his Bible in Hebrew and celebrate Purim and Passover. His feelings for his father were "ambivalent" at best, but we learn something about his relationship to his father through the anti-semitiscm they faced throughout life. When he was 10 years old, his father was approached by a anti-semitic bully who knocked his cap off into the mud, shouting, "Jew! Get off the pavement!" When Freud asked his father what he did, his father replied, "I went in the roadway and picked up my cap." Freud said that struck him as "unheroic conduct on the part of a big, strong man..." Determined not to live in the shadow of anti-semitiscm, Freud would not spend his life taking on a passive acceptance to his condition, but would fight it tooth and nail.

Another event in Freud's life that would play a major role in his antagonism to the spiritual worldview lay in his broken relationship with his Catholic nanny. Freud became very attached to his nanny at a young age because his mother had been consumed by the sickness and death of his younger sibling. His nanny instilled in him many of the basic tenets of the Catholic faith and it's in these observations (the kneeling, signs of the cross, and routineness of mass) that scholars believe caused him to write papers comparing religious practices with obsessive symptons and referring to religion as the "universal obsessional neurosis." Scholars speculate, it was only after his nanny was dismissed abrubtly from her service - being accused of stealing - that Freud's anger and disappointment toward faith and the Catholic Church were planted. Freud confirms this in some of the letters he wrote mentioning how he would often dream of his childhood nanny.

Other influences in Freud's life may have been in his reading of Ludwig Feurbach's, "The Essence of Christianity," in which Feurbach asserts in his conclusions, "We have shown that the substance and object of religion is altogether human; we have shown that divine wisdom is human wisdom; that the secret of theology is anthropology; that the absolute mind is the so-called finite subjective mind." The cultural environment of Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the medical school where he studied also influenced Freud. Historian Peter Gay wrote about "sizable pockets of anticlericalism and of secularist contempt for all religion." It's no wonder Freud would accept many of these "pockets" in the scientific community, whose acceptance he so strongly desired to advance his career and theories.

These major events and experiences laid the foundation for Freud's studies and many of his theory formulations. He formulated a theory by observing clinically that children experience a phase in their psychosexual development during which they experience positive feelings toward the parent of the opposite sex and feelings of rivalry toward the parent of the same sex. He called this the Oedipus Complex. He wrote, I have found in my own case too, [the phenomenon of] being in love with my mother and jealous of my father, and I now consider it a universal event in early childhood." However, one wonder if Freud ultimately based this analysis on "self-evaluation" - he did, after all, come from a very unusual family with an elderly father and attractive teenager for a mother.

Nevertheless, these events and upbringing laid the foundation for one of Freud's major assertions against the existence of a Creator; that one's ambivalence toward parental authority - especially the positive feelings of that ambivalence - forms the basis of one's deep seated wish for God.

Next we examine Lewis' childhood.

Blessings,

Joe