Armand Nicholi, Jr is a psychiatrist and professor at Harvard Medical School. He is an expert in Freud studies and has done extensive research both on Freud's psychoanalytic method and his life (including regular meetings with Freud's students and even his children). For years Nicholi taught a class on Freud's worldview. But as the years went by he thought that for the class to be more effective, Freud needed a foil: someone who shared some common biography but ultimately embraced a different worldview with different empirical results. He chose C.S. Lewis as Freud's foil, and Nicholi's seminar on Freud and Lewis has been one of Harvard's most popular classes. The class has spawned a PBS series, a play called Freud's Last Session, and the book The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life.

The book begins with a compare and contrast of Freud and Lewis' thoughts on God and morality. In perhaps the most interesting chapter, Nicholi describes the phenomenon of conversion. He describes Freud's initial fascination and ultimate rejection of religion and Lewis' atheism and ultimate conversion to Christianity. Nicholi also describes his own clinical research on the phenomenon of conversion.

The last part of the book attempts to tease out the effects of embracing one worldview or the other. He compares not only the beliefs of Freud and Lewis, but also the way it impacted their happiness, relationships, and ability to cope with suffering and death.

The Question of God is a unique book. It was been very well received and indeed has endorsements from a wide variety of sources: Ken Burns (documentary filmmaker), Peter Kreeft (philosopher), Timothy Johnson (Medical Editor, ABC News), and Ralph Johnson (CEO, Johnson & Johnson). Nicholi is a Christian, and while he has tremendous affection and respect for Sigmund Freud, largely agrees with Lewis. That might not be noteworthy in itself. But Nicholi goes a step further and argues that as a clinical psychiatrist, he believes the worldview espoused by Lewis leads to a greater degree of mental health than the one espoused by Freud. He attempts to show this from Freud and Lewis' lives, but also from his larger clinical research.

I recommend this book highly. A fun read: a mixture of biography, science, and philosophy. Well worth your time whether you consider yourself an atheist, believer, or somewhere in between.