When I was an intern after finishing medical school, I encountered human suffering for the first time, especially in small children that had a fatal illness. I couldn’t understand how anyone on heaven or on earth who had the ability to preempt this would not do so, and the whole problem of suffering suddenly preoccupied me. Somebody had put a little book called The Problem of Pain by Lewis on the table in the library of the hospital that I was at. It didn’t answer all the questions but it answered some of them.

So fast-forward to when I was thinking about finding a counterpoint to Freud. I thought of Lewis and I started reading his works for the first time quite seriously. And much to my surprise, I found that there was a striking parallelism—Freud raises a question and Lewis attempts to answer it. And I realized as I got to know more about Lewis that Lewis was in literary criticism, and at that time in Europe, Freud’s concepts were permeating the universities and providing literary critics with new tools to use in understanding human behavior. So Lewis knew Freud’s work very very well. And he also used Freud’s arguments from his philosophical works to defend his own atheism. So after Lewis’ transition to a spiritual worldview, as he begins to define and defend that worldview, he uses arguments that are counterarguments for Freud’s arguments. So this provides a real striking parallelism that I never realized was there, and I think it’s this dialectic that makes the course what it has become.

THC: At one point Freud modestly says, “I said nothing which other and better men have not said before me in a much more complete, forcible manner.” If your ultimate goal was simply to have someone defend atheism and to have someone defend spiritiualism, there probably would be people who have promoted those views more aggressively. So what is it about these two—and have you ever thought about adding other voices to the dialogue?

AN: I think if you have too many voices, it tends to reduce the clarity. Both of these men wrote extremely well. Freud won the Goethe Prize for Literature, and of course Lewis is known for his clarity and conciseness; his writings have probably been among the most influential of the 20th century. Now it’s true that Freud did say that, but then he also said “All I did was add a great psychological foundation.” People before him like Feuerbach and Voltaire and many people of the Enlightenment said that this whole concept of intelligence beyond the universe was a projection of our own and our needs. What Freud does is identify those needs or those wishes; that’s the psychological foundation that he adds.

THC: Why not have a psychiatrist respond to him? Obviously Lewis is responding to Freud’s work but he is coming at it from a different angle because he is in literature.

AN: Yes, he is. But he also has a complementary understanding of human behavior that comes form the great literature. And that in some sense is more nuanced and more sophisticated than what comes solely from clinical experience and interaction with people.

THC: You’ve been teaching for so long. When did you decide that you were going to write this particular book?

AN: Many people on the faculty had suggested that I write the book a long time ago, and I started collecting a database. Both men wrote so prolifically—just volumes and volumes of scholarly work plus tens of thousands of letters—that it took me a long time to get it all into a database and organize it. As you know the book is kind of heavily referenced. So I’m glad that I did do the resesarch for it because it does make it more than just my opinion; I’ve documented it pretty clearly.

THC: How long did the actual writing take?

AN: Well I’ve been collecting the data off and on for some twenty years. Actual writing—well, I’ve been invited by many universities to give papers on this, so I began writing maybe at least ten or fifteen years ago. Then I was asked to give the Nobel lectures at Harvard, and then I was asked to give some lectures at Oxford University on Freud and Lewis and this helped crystallize some of my thinking. And then somebody sent a set of my lectures to Simon & Schuster without my knowing it, and they came up to Cambridge and said, “we’d like you to consider writing a book for us.” And I did. I had to be taken by the collar!