The Atheist and the Apologist
‘Freud’s Last Session’ opts for fictional family drama over deeper questions
BY CRAIG HARSHAW
C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud debate the existence of God in Freud’s Last Session (2023). Source: Sony Pictures
Sigmund Freud’s famous dictum “from error to error, one discovers the entire truth” seems entirely appropriate as a guide for attempting to critically evaluate Matthew Brown’s strange film adaptation of Mark St. Germain’s one-act play Freud’s Last Session.
St. Germain’s play is a creative reaction to psychiatrist Armand Nicholi’s 2002 book The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex and the Meaning of Life, a kind of documentation of a famous seminar Nicholi taught at Harvard which utilized writings by Lewis and Freud to explore questions of God and spirituality. (The seminar also inspired a well-received 1984 series on PBS.) St. Germain, moved by Nicholi’s exploration, wrote his two-character play in 2009 with the dramatic conceit of imagining a meeting between the two men in the war-torn London of 1939, just a few weeks before Freud’s death. While this is an interesting choice—since both men lived in the same city at the same time and were aware of each other, and since Freud met with a wide range of intellectuals—it is at the same time rather limiting.
Nicholi’s pedagogically imaginative seminar placed Freud and Lewis in a kind of abstract dialogue, with Freud’s writings from the nineteenth and early twentieth century often replying to Lewis’s writings from the mid-late twentieth century. Once the two men are embodied on stage, it becomes anachronistic to oppose their mature views in this way. This stacks the deck towards Freud, because he is the eighty-three-year-old man with a wide range of material while Lewis is only forty years old with much of his most important work in front of him. Lewis in 1939 has only considered himself a Christian for eight years, and his only major work on the subject of Christianity published before Freud died was his satirical novel A Pilgrim’s Regress. With all this said, the play does attempt to get at some of the ideas embedded in Nicholi’s project.
“Imagine how much more interesting it would be if we had some scenes in Brown’s film looking at Lewis’s love life … dramatizing how a man who has remained faithful to his dead friend’s mother, a woman who took his virginity as a teenager under the nose of that friend and whom he publicly refers to as ‘Mother,’ deals with being confronted by Dr. Freud.”
Matthew Brown’s film, however, seems rather uninterested in an examination of the philosophical ideas of either Freud or Lewis, preferring to focus on each man’s probable psychological motivations for choosing either religious or secular beliefs. To this end, Lewis is reduced to choosing God as a way of dealing with the physical and emotional trauma he experienced as a combatant in World War I, while Freud is reduced to choosing secularism because of his experiences as a victim of anti-Semitism, his disgust at fascism, and his heartbreak at the loss of his daughter and his grandson to fatal diseases. Once the filmmakers have decided on such pat answers, little exploration of either man’s thinking is necessary. Brown’s approach to the material is disastrous if one is looking for a serious exploration of existential questions by two fascinating historical thinkers. In fact, in many ways Lewis begins to suggest less the actual historical Christian apologist writer that he was and more a kind of shadowy symbolic figure. Sigmund Freud could literally be talking to himself or to his adorable chow chow Jofi.
Brown seems much more interested in mining the perverse subplot of Anna Freud’s relationship to her father than in exploring anything else in his film. While Liv Lisa Fries is a wonderful actress (as evidenced by her work on the German series Babylon Berlin), she isn’t given a three-dimensional character to play. Although Anna Freud was an influential and fascinating thinker, you wouldn’t know that from her construction here. In fact, she is characterized as almost a pure victim of her father’s lack of understanding. This is a rather extraordinary leap for the filmmakers to make.
I believe that Brown was almost certainly influenced in his characterization of Anna by Rebecca Coffey’s 2014 novel Hysterical: Anna Freud’s Story, a work of totally imagined fiction. The press for Coffey’s novel claims it is a “fact based.” This is rather like claiming that William Shakespeare’s play Anthony and Cleopatra, inspired by the historical figures, is fact based. The marketing for the book suggests that since Coffey, a celebrated science writer and humorist, did lots of research while writing her novel, it is somehow a work of historical truth telling. Nothing could be further from reality. The book is clearly a work of Coffey’s imagination much as Gore Vidal’s historical novels are works of his imagination. Unfortunately, Coffey and her promoters, unlike Vidal, have consciously worked to confuse the boundaries between fictional creation and historical authenticity.
For example, while many people, myself included, believe that Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham were probably romantic partners, this was never clearly confirmed by either woman. Coffey’s novel makes their love affair a fact and goes on to suggest that Sigmund Freud was hostile to his daughter’s sexual orientation. It’s fine to posit this in a novel, but it seems to have been lifted as a “fact” by Brown in the construction of his film. I’d have no problem with Brown directing a film of Coffey’s novel that was clearly understood to be a work of creative fiction. This is similar to how real people are fictionalized in Andrew Dominik’s film of Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde or Quentin Tarantino’s film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and its accompanying novel; in both those cases I am offended by the way the directors utilize misogyny in representing, respectively, Marilyn Monroe and Sharon Tate, but I am not concerned that any reasonable adult would actually think that these are realistic portraits of either woman. In contrast, my fear with Brown’s film is that reasonable people, and especially people who haven’t seriously engaged with psychoanalytic literature, will come to believe that the depictions of Dorothy Burlingham, Ernest Jones, and Sigmund and Anna Freud are based on serious historical research. The film clearly notes that it is unknown whether Lewis and Freud actually met; however, it doesn’t make clear that Sigmund Freud never publicly or privately, that we know of, showed any disapproval towards Dorothy Burlingham and his daughter having a very close relationship. In fact, he named them “the twins” and referred to them in public as “his daughter” and “her twin.”
The film also doesn’t historicize how incredibly violent homophobia was in the UK during the time the Freuds and Burlingham and her children were in exile there. While lesbianism was not criminalized, male homosexual activity was, and it was violently policed until finally being decriminalized in 1967. Sigmund Freud’s positions that human beings are constitutionally bisexual and that homosexuality was not a form of either moral degeneracy or serious mental illness were still shockingly radical positions on the day he died in 1939. They were also politically courageous positions for the founder of psychoanalysis to hold. Freud, who was less inclined towards direct action political protest than most other founders of psychoanalysis, did nonetheless take part in public demonstrations related to decriminalizing homosexuality and supporting women’s legal emancipation from restrictive gender laws and exclusion from electoral politics. He also took startlingly progressive positions on issues of representation, including an early call for the necessity of gender equity as a goal for the psychoanalytic profession.
Brown’s film, however, follows a neoliberal historical revisionist trend that neutralizes Freud’s political beliefs. Freud’s ideological beliefs are crucial to making sense of the history of the psychoanalytic movement, which rose to the height of its power in the political era of “Red Vienna.” During this era, psychoanalysis and other forms of psychotherapy were able to flourish in Austria because of the 1919 victory of the left-wing Social Democratic Workers’ Party. The center-left government supported psychotherapeutic programs and thus allowed the field space to grow. Suppressing this historical reality, many neoliberal thinkers have attempted to recast all forms of psychotherapy as a kind of magical, individualistic remedy for the problems of capitalist exploitation by suggesting that oppression has psychological rather than political roots. (There has been a recent attempted corrective to this trend with books like Elizabeth Danto’s Freud’s Free Clinics and Daniel Jose Gaztambide’s A People’s History of Psychoanalysis). Freud’s attempts to negotiate the political context of his day are thus often ignored in mainstream accounts of his aims and methods.
Brown’s film offers a fascinating case in this type of distortion when it suggests that Freud found male homosexuality fine but lesbianism an illness that needed to be cured. In point of fact, Freud never wrote or is not known to have said anything to this effect. He believed in constitutional bisexuality, and thus when working with a patient who was distressed at their homosexual desires the exploration would be around whether or not heterosexual desires could also be accessed. He is very clear that there is no “cure” for homosexuality because it is not a disorder that would need to be cured. Neoliberal thinkers, who see all forms of psychotherapy as being about “fixing” personal problems, confuse this notion and believe that Sigmund and Anna Freud were open to practicing “conversion” therapy. This is a misunderstanding based on not seeing the role that political reality—in this case that homosexuality was illegal and punishable by imprisonment and even death into the twentieth century—must play in any meaningful analysis. To counsel caution about sexual expression need not mean pathologizing the individual, as it was foremost a way of addressing political reality and keeping patients safe.
I believe it is this flawed version of Freud that the film tasks Anthony Hopkins with embodying. I also believe that Hopkins’s instincts as an actor may be somewhat at war with this conception. Hopkins has played a wide range of historical figures including Richard Nixon, Adolph Hitler, Alfred Hitchcock, Pope Benedict XVI, John Quincy Adams, Pablo Picasso, and, ironically, in one of his most acclaimed performances, a middle-aged C. S. Lewis. Hopkins is not and has never aspired to be a movie star but has remained focused on being a professional actor who slips in and out of a film director’s vision of reality. This is a highly laudable position for an artist and has led to his remarkably long and brilliant career. The downside of this position is that when he works on a film whose vision is confused, he simply can’t lift up the material in the way a star persona often can.
Matthew Goode’s C. S. Lewis is much more of a disappointment than Hopkins’s Freud because Goode is such a remarkably intense actor when he has anything to really play. He has the ability, in much of his work, to bring seemingly contradictory character traits into dialogue with each other. He often brings a rather raw sensuality into material that is unexpected but highly welcomed. So, I was intrigued when I heard of his casting as C. S. Lewis, who was rumored to have a rather unorthodox romantic life with Mrs. Janie Moore, a woman he met when he was eighteen years old and she was forty-five. As Alister McGrath points out in his excellent scholarly biography of Lewis, middle-aged women deflowering young men who were being deployed to the front in World War I was rather common; what was usual about Lewis’s relationship with Mrs. Moore is that it lasted until her death from old age. Now, whether or not Lewis and Mrs. Moore actually had a sexual relationship can’t be definitively known any more than whether Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham were actually romantic partners. However, in both cases it seems more likely than not. Imagine how much more interesting it would be if we had some scenes in Brown’s film looking at Lewis’s love life with Mrs. Moore, who would at the time of the film be in her mid-sixties, dramatizing how a man who has remained faithful to his dead friend’s mother, a woman who took his virginity as a teenager under the nose of that friend and whom he publicly refers to as “Mother,” deals with being confronted by Dr. Freud. However, Brown makes the choice of concocting a false narrative to explain away Mrs. Moore as a sexual partner by suggesting that Lewis and Moore met after he was wounded on the battlefield.
This choice raises a very interesting question about the way the filmmakers decide to distort the lives of the two men at the center of their film. With Sigmund Freud the inventions are wildly speculative and suggest that Freud was a preposterously contradictory thinker. For example, he is shown as a militant defender of gay men but as seemingly believing that lesbians need to be cured of a disorder. It’s also implied that he has an emotionally incestuous relationship with his own daughter that he seems perfectly comfortable with. Lewis, on the other hand, is treated with a kind of hands-off respect that actually turns him into a rather vapid individual whose sole point of interest is the trauma he has experienced during World War I.
Why are the two protagonists treated so differently in this radical adaptation of St. Germain’s play? I can only deduce that Brown has a bit of an axe to grind against Dr. Freud. I’m going to speculate that the axe may have something to do with the controversy that exploded in the mid-1980’s when Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson published his incendiary The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory, which suggested that Sigmund Freud’s abandonment of his belief in rampant childhood sexual trauma in Europe was motivated primarily by careerist rather than scientific reasons. The book suggests that Freud’s classic Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality may have been prompted by an unethical attempt to suppress the fact that European culture was highly abusive and sexually disoriented. Masson’s book is interesting, but he makes many interpretive leaps that I am skeptical of to try to make his case that Freud was either a coward or a careerist. Masson seems fixated on the idea of Sigmund Freud as betrayer of the rights of the child, without seeming open to the possibility that the situation was more complicated. Once one accepts the idea of Sigmund Freud as betrayer, as someone like Rebecca Coffey does, it becomes much easier to exaggerate negative aspects of his character even to the point of fabricating ideas about his abuse of his own children. Since the 1980s this has, at least in the United States, become a dominant view of Freud even if most people have never read (or even heard of) Masson’s book.
This is the way ideas travel through culture in the age of social media and the internet. People have ideas about important thinkers like Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, etc., that may in no way be related to anything they actually thought or wrote. In our educational system we often are not even assigned these kinds of core thinkers but rather read textbooks that summarize their writings, often in ways that are highly distorted and diminished. This is why a film like Freud’s Last Session poses a real problem for critical assessment. Preposterous representations do have political consequences.
Part of what makes Brown’s film adaptation of St. Germain’s play seem like such a lost opportunity is the contemporary relevance of passages that Brown chooses to omit. Chief among these is the opening argument between Lewis and Freud about Freud’s final major book, which had just been published a few months before this imaginary meeting: Moses and Monotheism. In the play it is clear that Lewis wants to talk about this text, which has deeply shocked him. Lewis quizzes Freud about the most provocative suppositions in the book, including that “God never chose the ‘chosen people’ but that Moses did” and that “Moses wasn’t a Jew but an Egyptian.” During the discussion Lewis jokes, “No wonder your book is selling so well. Jews must be standing in line in order to tear it to pieces,” to which Freud replies, “And me. But Jews must wait their turn behind my greatest enemy the Catholic Church!” Here the play is really commenting on some interesting ideas in an entertaining and dramatic way. I think we have to ask why this entire discussion was extracted from the film. Was it because of its possible ideological content? Freud was well known for his anticolonial politics, and on principle he was opposed to Zionism as he made clear on numerous occasions (e.g., in a 1930 letter to Dr. Chaim Koffler). St. Germain makes a brilliant choice beginning the discussion of religion by making it clear that Freud has a critique of the entire Abrahamic tradition and isn’t merely picking on Christianity because he has a famous Christian apologist in front of him. Brown’s excision of this section makes it seem like Freud may simply be an embittered elderly Jewish man more akin to Shakespeare’s Shylock from Merchant of Venice than to a thinker who centers his critique of the religious tradition by thinking deeply about his own relationship to Judaism.
Of course, one might argue that Brown, or perhaps producers of the film, excised this section as a way of avoiding controversy because of the contemporary political moment. In other words, the filmmakers, may have been afraid to correctly characterize Freud as an anti-Zionist Jewish thinker because it might offend potential viewers. However, to take Freud’s anti-Zionist politics away from him is also to take away why he was passionately a secularist. Freud explicitly feared that religion often leads to the psychological creation of a barbaric “other.” In other words, Freud found the concept of “God’s chosen people” distasteful because embedded in that concept is that only some people are worthy of being chosen by God.
Part of the responsibility of any film viewer is to critically engage with narratives that purport to dramatize the lives of historical figures. This is in keeping with Freud’s general methodology, for as the great Palestinian cultural critic Edward Said wrote in his Freud and the Non-European, “Freud is a remarkable instance of a thinker for whom scientific work was, as he often said, a kind of archaeological excavation of the buried, forgotten, repressed, and denied past.”
Craig Harshaw is a performance artist, cultural critic, and theater director. He has taught or worked for Columbia College Chicago, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and MCA Chicago. He hosts DIVISIVE, a live radio broadcast exploring cultural work and politics.
