The primary care physician's guide to common psychiatric and neurologic problems Book

I'm a bit conflicted about how I feel about this book. It was for sure worth the read; I learned a lot, and I went through different emotions as I read it and thought both about the material in the book and how the ideas fit into my life. The book is flawed, in my opinion, but could of the bias it takes on the side of Lewis. It's main argument boiled down to: Freud had a depressing life and was an atheist, Lewis had an enjoyable life and was a believer, ergo, believing is the right way to go. I don't think this makes Lewis' worldview right or Freud's wrong, but instead are the possible costs/benefits of these worldviews.

And yet, I am compelled to somewhat agree with this, though not quite full-heartily. I've been agnostic all of my adult life, and while secular humanism, to me, has a wonderful, uplifting aspect to it, this aspect kinda has a peak to it, and you can only suck so much out of that peak at any one time. The rest of this worldview has a lot of emptiness and despair in to it. This is what troubled Freud most of his life, what troubled Lewis during the first half of his life, and has recently been shaking my own "non belief."

I think that both Freud and Lewis have accurate views of the other's worldviews. Freud says we come up with religion because we need that authority in our lives that we loose when we grow out of childhood. Lewis says, in terms of his own atheism at one point, says that quite often he was mad at God more than he didn't believe in God. This is how I often find myself: though I can rationalize that there is no God, I often hate God for not existing. Lewis sees this kind of feeling as an innate desire for God that we all have, which to him is a main piece of evidence for God's existence. I don't see that as evidence of God's existence, but I can see and feel the atheist's anger at God and the believer's need to create God.

In addition, I generally just learned a lot from the book; much of it is made up of the letters and works of the subjects and makes me want to seek out more to read from Freud and Lewis. So with that said, this is a book that I liked reading, though I didn't totally like some of the basis for the book in general.