Armand M. Nicholi Jr. > Quotes

“Freud eventually developed his theory of transference, one that would play a key role in his method of treating emotional disorders and that still today gives us some insight into how we choose both our friends and the person we marry. Feelings in relationships as we now understand them run on a double track. We react and relate to another person not only on the basis of how we consciously experience that person, but also on the basis of our unconscious experience in reference to our past relationships with significant people in infancy and childhood—particularly parents and other family members. We tend to displace our feelings and attitudes from these past figures onto people in the present, especially if someone has features similar to a person in the past. An individual may, therefore, evoke intense feelings in us—strong attraction or strong aversion—totally inappropriate to our knowledge of or experience with that person. This process may, to varying degrees, influence our choice of a friend, roommate, spouse, or employer. We all have the experience of seeing someone we have never met who evokes in us strong feelings. According to the theory of transference, this occurs because something about that person—the gait, the tilt of the head, a laugh, or some other feature—recalls a significant figure in our early childhood. Sometimes a spouse or a superior we work under will provoke in us a reaction far more intense than the circumstances warrant. A gesture or tone of voice may reactivate early negative feelings we experienced toward an important childhood figure. *”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“Where is God?” He noted that “when you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be—or so it feels—welcomed with open arms.” But when Lewis needed Him most, God appeared to be absent. “But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become . . . What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“Does the spiritual worldview hinder functioning or enhance it? Does it provide resources that make our few days on this planet more meaningful? Freud argues that because it is not true, it can’t work. Basing one’s life on an illusion, on a false premise, will make living more difficult. Only the truth can help us confront the harsh realities of life. Lewis, however, argues that the most important reality concerns our relationship with the Person who made us. Until that relationship is established, no accomplishment, no fame or fortune will ever satisfy us. Who is right?”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“Affection almost slinks or seeps through our lives. It lives with humble, un-dress, private things: soft slippers, old clothes, old jokes, the thump of a sleepy dog’s tail on the kitchen floor, the sound of a sewing machine”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“Freud says this commandment, along with “love your enemies,” absolutely bewilders him. He simply cannot understand it. He asks: “Why should we do it? What good will it do us? But, above all, how shall we achieve it? How can it be possible? My love is something valuable to me which I ought not to throw away without reflection . . . If I love someone, he must deserve it in some way . . . He deserves it if he is so like me in important ways that I can love myself in him; and he deserves it if he is so much more perfect than myself that I can love my ideal of my own self in him . . . But if he is a stranger to me and if he cannot attract me by any worth of his own or any significance that he may already have acquired for my emotional life, it will be hard for me to love him. Indeed, I should be wrong to do so, for my love is valued by all my own people as a sign of my preferring them, and it is an injustice to them if I put a stranger on a par with them.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right . . . Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“Indeed the best thing about happiness itself,” Lewis writes, “is that it liberates you from thinking about happiness—as the greatest pleasure that money can give us is to make it unnecessary to think about money . .”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“We have shown that the substance and object of religion is altogether human; we have shown that divine wisdom is human wisdom; that the secret of theology is anthropology; that the absolute mind is the so-called finite subjective mind.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“When the growing individual finds that he is destined to remain a child for ever, that he can never do without protection against strange superior powers, he lends those powers the features belonging to the figure of his father.” Thus, God is often depicted as someone to be feared as well as loved.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“Man is never happy, but spends his whole life striving after something he thinks will make him so,”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“Recent research by neuroscientists adds a twist here. Evidence exists that the human brain is “hardwired” (genetically programmed) for belief. Whether, if true, this wiring reflects an Intelligence beyond the universe depends on one’s worldview. As Lewis states, what we learn from evidence “depends on the kind of philosophy we bring” to the evidence.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“. I keep brooding on whether I shall reach the age of my father and brother, or even that of my mother, tortured as I am by the conflict between the desire for rest, the dread of renewed suffering (which a prolonged life would mean) and by the anticipation of sorrow at being separated from everything to which I am still attached.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“Clinically, I have observed that all of us have some conflict with our parents and therefore some ambivalence toward authority. The differences are in degree and not in kind. Remember that Freud said of the child’s attitude toward his father: “It fears him no less than it longs for him and admires him.” Freud may be correct that these early feelings toward parental authority influence one’s concept of and attitude toward God. They may determine as adults whether we remain open to or defiant and closed to even the possibility of an Ultimate Authority.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“Biologically speaking, religiousness is to be traced to the small human child’s long-drawn-out helplessness and need of help.” He argued we all share a less conscious but very strong wish for the protection of our parents, especially that of our fathers. When we become adults, we still find ourselves helpless when confronted with the great forces of life, and so we conjure up a figure like the one who protected us as a child. “Psychoanalysis,” Freud writes in his 1910 paper on Leonardo da Vinci, “has shown us that a personal God is, psychologically, nothing other than an exalted father . .”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was also equally angry with Him for creating a world . . . why should creatures have the burden of existence forced on them without their consent?”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“In the wider world, we keep hectically busy and fill every free moment of our day with some form of diversion—work, computers, television, movies, radio, magazines, newspapers, sports, alcohol, drugs, parties. Perhaps we distract ourselves because looking at our lives confronts us with our lack of meaning, our unhappiness, and our loneliness—and with the difficulty, the fragility, and the unbelievable brevity of life.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“In his Future of an Illusion, Freud described what life would be like when people rejected the spiritual worldview, perhaps describing what he himself experienced. “They will have to admit to themselves the full extent of their helplessness . . . they can no longer be the centre of the creation, no longer the object of the tender care on the part of the beneficent Providence . . . And, as for the great necessities of Fate, against which there is no help, they will learn to endure them with resignation.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“What accounts for the profound impact the writings of C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud continue to have on our culture a half century after their deaths? One reason for their impact may be that, whether we realize it or not, we all embrace some form of either the materialist worldview advocated by Freud or the spiritual worldview advocated by Lewis. But there may be more subtle reasons. Perhaps Freud and Lewis represent conflicting parts of ourselves. One part raises its voice in defiance of authority, and says with Freud, “I will not surrender”; another part, like Lewis, recognizes within ourselves a deep-seated yearning for a relationship with the Creator.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“We shall tell ourselves that it would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence and if there were a moral order in the universe and an afterlife, but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.” Freud therefore concludes that belief in God is merely a projection of powerful wishes and inner needs. He writes: “. . . religious ideas, which are given out as teachings . . . are illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of these wishes.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“The writings of Freud and Lewis help us understand one difficulty we often have in seeing the signposts—namely, our tendency to distort our image of God. One of Freud’s theories that has proved helpful clinically relates to the unconscious process of transference, the tendency to displace feelings from authority figures in our childhood onto those in the present, thus distorting and causing conflict with the present authority. If we possess a strong tendency to displace or transfer feelings from parental authority, especially the father, onto present-day authority figures, how much more might we distort our concept of an Ultimate Authority whom we cannot experience with our senses? If this holds true, we must be careful that our concept of God—whether the God we reject as unbelievers or that we worship as believers—is firmly based on the Creator revealed in history and not on our neurotic distortion of Him.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“Freud, however, asserts that ethics and morals come from human need and experience. The idea of a universal moral law as proposed by philosophers is “in conflict with reason.” He writes that “ethics are not based on a moral world order but on the inescapable exigencies of human cohabitation.” In other words, our moral code comes from what humans find to be useful and expedient.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“Freud appears to realize that logically one cannot prove a negative—one cannot prove that God does not exist. The only real defense of his worldview is to discredit its alternative. Thus, Freud undertook a systematic and sustained attack on the spiritual worldview. He attacked it with sledgehammer blows. He wrote that the “tales of miracles . . . contradicted everything that had been taught by sober observation and betrayed too clearly the influence of the activity of the human imagination.” He asserted that the Scriptures “are full of contradictions, revisions and falsifications”; he said no intelligent person can accept the “absurdities” or “fairy tales” of believers.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“Freud reminds them that children do not conceptualize or fear death as do adults. He then lists what he thinks adults fear about death: “the horrors of corruption . . . freezing in the ice-cold grave . . . the terrors of eternal nothingness.” He then adds that adults cannot tolerate these fears, “as is proved by all the myths of a future life.” Freud believed that people accepted the religious worldview because of their fear of death and their wish for permanence.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“The unresolved conflict between, on the one hand, a longing for the father and, on the other, a fear of him and a son’s defiance of him, has furnished us with an explanation of important characteristics of religion and decisive vicissitudes in it.” The positive feelings reemerge as one’s concept of God; and the negative feelings as one’s concept of the devil. *”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“He concludes that one can do only three things about death: “To desire it, to fear it, or to ignore it. The third alternative, which is the one the modern world calls ‘healthy,’ is surely the most uneasy and precarious of all.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“had very definitely formed the opinion that the universe was, in the main, a rather regrettable institution”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“if anyone asked me ‘why do you not believe in God?’ my reply would run something like this . . .” First, the starkness of the universe: “the greatest part of it consists of empty space, completely dark and unimaginably cold . . . all the forms of life live only by preying upon one another . . . The creatures cause pain by being born, and live by inflicting pain and in pain they mostly die.” Next, in the “most complex creatures, Man, yet another quality appears, which we call reason, whereby he is enabled to foresee his own pain which henceforth is preceded with acute mental suffering, and to foresee his own death while keenly desiring permanence.” This human history is “a record of crime, war, disease, and terror with just sufficient happiness interposed to give . . . an agonized apprehension of losing it.” In short, “If you ask me to believe that this is the work of a benevolent and omnipotent spirit, I reply that all the evidence points in the opposite direction.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” Lewis continues: “If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“Wars demonstrate that our basic impulses have changed little from those of our primitive ancestors, that underneath our civility we are just as uncivilized and savage as ever. Wars show that “our unconscious is just as inaccessible to the idea of our own death, just as murderously inclined towards strangers, just as divided (that is, ambivalent) towards those we love, as was primeval man.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

“Whereas happiness appears to be very difficult to attain in this life, “unhappiness is much less difficult to experience.” Freud explains: “We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful to us than any other.” Freud dismisses out of hand the large number of people who find that spiritual resources help free them from this “unrest,” “unhappiness,” and “anxiety.” He calls religious faith “an attempt to procure a certainty of happiness and a protection against suffering through a delusional remolding of reality . . . and no one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such.”
― Armand M. Nicholi Jr., The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life