Freud’s Last Session

Did the great Sigmund Freud and author and Oxford academic C.S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia) ever meet? Probably not, but as this stage play-to-film adaptation invites, wouldn’t they have had a wild conversation if they did?  The play and film set the action in September 1939, just after Hitler has invaded Poland. Freud, an avowed atheist, is dying of oral cancer. What he wants to know from Lewis is how someone of his credentialed intellect could still believe in God. But that’s not all they talk about. Freud can’t help but dig into Lewis’ fixations, and vice versa. The writer and the psychoanalyst spar over the petty and the deeply personal, the mundane and life’s grandest questions. Hopkins’ portrayal of an older, doubting Lewis in Shadowlands (1993) also informs his fascinating turn as Freud.