The Great Debate.("The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life")

The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life, by Armand M. Nicholi Jr. (Free Press, 304 pp., $25)

This book began as a series of lectures for undergraduates, taught for 25 years at Harvard College and at the Medical School. The course is both demanding and rewarding, which I believe for three reasons. First, I have a young friend who took the course, who raved about it to me in detail, and whose life it changed, for the better and forever. Second, I am an "adviser" on an attempt to make a film version of the course's idea, and so have learned of its instructor's reputation for rigor (although I do not know Armand Nicholi personally). And finally, Dr. Nicholi -- psychiatrist, professor at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, and clinician in private practice -- shows himself in this book as a teacher of both great intellectual range and contagious devotion to disinterested argument.

The book's design is simple: In its nine main chapters, Nicholi's protagonists, C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud, treat -- more or less alternately -- such major intellectual topics as God, happiness, pain, and death. Nicholi has a gift for apt and ample quotation, and along the way provides biographical vignettes and insights of the kind that are indispensable in a book about two people who so frequently used themselves as data. His writing, at once allusive and lean, arouses a thirst: Would that we were in the Nicholi classroom to hear the professor's ready interjections, so fitting are they, and to make our own interjections.

I begin mine with quibbles. Well-read in Lewis, Nicholi nevertheless leaves two strange gaps in his account of Lewis's life and work. Owing, I think, to an excessive and naive reliance on Lewis's autobiography, Surprised by Joy, and to a maladroit use of letters, he too easily dismisses the possibility (in fact, a probability) of a sexual liaison between Lewis and Mrs. Moore, his mother-surrogate. Second, the small use Nicholi has for Lewis's imaginative work allows him to ignore, for example, Lewis's early poetry. This is debilitating, since those works are especially relevant to Lewis's relationship with his father; and the son-father relationship is at the very center of Freud's thinking, and Nicholi's as well. Perhaps, in his appealing sympathy for Freud, Nicholi is backing away from the truth that Lewis was in fact the more complex man.

In general, however, Nicholi wears his authority easily, and thus is very persuasive. When he refers to his own clinical interests and experience, to a visit at the Freud home, or to his conversations with Anna Freud (who emphasized to him the importance of her father's letters), I am impressed; when he diagnoses the etiology of Freud's worldview -- his philosophical influences, filial embarrassment, and social resentment arising from anti-Semitism -- I am instructed; when he writes that Freud's argument respecting rebellion against authority "cannot explain changes of view very ...