THC: Who do you want to read the book?

AN: I think that everyone’s preoccupied with these questions at some level. I think everyone embraces some form of Lewis’s worldview or some form of Freud’s worldview. Everyone, whether they realize it or not, has a worldview. That worldview is formed very early in life, and it begins with one of two premises: one is that the universe is an accident and life on this universe a matter of chance, and the other is that there’s an intelligence beyond the universe that is somehow related to our purpose in being here. That worldview is the lens through which we see the universe. It influences our concept of where we come from, our heritage, who we are, our identity, our moral code that we live by, our relationships, how we see other people and where we think we’re going, our destiny.

THC: You have a statistic in the book that 96 percent of Americans believe in some form of God—people seem to have made an opinion heavily weighted in one direction. Have people considered this, or might their minds change while reading your book?

AN: I don’t really know what people’s reaction will be. I’ve tried to approach this from my training as a scientist to look at both views objectively and dispassionately—I try to do this in my course—and to look at it through “scrutinized observation” (to use Freud’s phrase). But the point is that everything that we look at we see through the lens of our worldview, and therefore the worldview that we bring to the evidence—even in science—influences how we interpret that evidence. So our worldview probably tells us more about ourselves than anything else in our personal history. It’s interesting that medicine over the past several years has taken a real interest in patients’ worldviews, and there’s a great deal of carefullly controled research to explore the impact of a patient’s worldview on his emotional and physical health. So these issues have become very much at the forefront of modern medical research.

THC: If Freud and Lewis were sitting down at a table, what might they both agree on—the biggest area where the two of them would agree philosophically?

AN: That’s a very interesting question. I think they’d be very courteous to one another—the age difference would probably ensure that. I think they would agree that these questions are indeed the most important questions. Because Freud would insist that if your whole life is based on a false premise, that can only lead to disaster. And Lewis would agree with that.

THC: There’s a tendency to put science and religion, or atheism and spirituality, in completely opposite camps—but do you think there are more places where Freud and Lewis might have agreed than they thought?

AN: I think they both shared the same view of human nature. They both have great insight into human behavior. It’s interesting because Freud, although he was familiar with the great literature, his concepts of behavior were based primarily on his clinical work; he was a brilliant and astute clinican. Lewis’ knowledge of human behavior, on the other hand, came primarily from the great literature, and from his interactions with the many friends that he had, and his observations of people in his environment, but primarily from the great literature. But that’s where they agreed; their insights into human behavior are not dissimilar.

THC: What was it like trying to represent two people who are so well known without having direct access to them? Were there places you had to make educated assumptions?

AN: Well, I’ve spent a number of summers at the Hamstead clinic in London, which is where Freud’s home is, and his daughter [Anna] is the head of the Hamstead clinic. She said to me often, “If you want to know my father, don’t read his biographers, read his letters.” I found that in both Freud’s letters and Lewis’ letters, I came to know them personally and to know them well, and to get an entirely different dimension of who they are, different from their writings and scholarly works.