Imagining Freud's Last Session

 Many people know the author CS Lewis through the post-WW2 Narnia series of fantasy books for children. We have a younger friend who read them avidly as a child and had no idea of their strongly Christian content. Lewis was an intellectual who taught at both Oxford and Cambridge, an atheist who was "suprised by joy" in a conversion to Christianity. He became an everyperson's apologist for the Christian faith in a number of books. He was also an unlikely rock star for the faith, with a series of  15-minute 'Mere Christianity" talks on BBC radio during WW2. Unfortunately only of them has survived. 

A film will be released later this year based on the play Freud's Last Session which is about a fictitious encounter between the founder of psychoanalysis and Lewis in London,  just before the war began. They were both in the city but there is no record of any meeting. This is more of a dramatized thought experiment about a conversation between an Austrian Jew who was an atheist and a former atheist who was an eloquent spokesperson for Christianity and faith in general. 

I look forward to Freud's Last Session, in no small part because Anthony Hopkins plays Freud. He was also CS Lewis 30 years ago in the very good Shadowlands with Debora Winger. 

In a time when civil discourse in religion seems to have vanished it will also be intriguing to see how the exchanges between two great minds are portrayed. In a Guardian review of the play Brian Logan observes: 

Spoiler alert: they do not settle the question of God’s existence. But the only thing more futile than having the conversation, argues Freud – and I found this point curiously touching – would be not having the conversation at all.