My sister, Billie, and I wrote this review of the 2023 film Freud’s Last Session, starring Anthony Hopkins and Matthew Goode. This is our first attempt at a review and was a a lot of fun to write. We approached it from our respective positions with Billie being a Lewis scholar and me psychoanalytic psychotherapist.
This brings us to why Freud fails to stand up as the champion of modern atheism. He isn’t interested in the job. Freud is fascinated in the person of Lewis and what has motivated Lewis’s belief. Freud seeks to understand rather than to convince. The very notion of psychoanalytic technique resists a directive approach. That’s not how he treats his patients, and it’s not what he attempts with Lewis.
I (Paul) find that this point is really significant in my own work with patients. In our current world, we have seemed to move into a black-and-white space of affirmation or confrontation. To understand or listen, then, has become synonymous with agreement, but that’s an unhealthy distortion. In working with patients, I rarely agree with the choices they are making, but that’s also rarely relevant. Their growth isn’t about conforming to my model of reality. And yet, that’s sadly the state of much contemporary discourse: ideas have become more important than people. What was refreshing about this film was its subversive movement from ideas to humans and not the other way around.
