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An imagined meeting of two worldviews in 1939 London: not a duel with a winner, but a conversation about pain, faith, and the limits of control. Original MriyaRun illustration.
Warning: This article contains spoilers. The film deals with themes of cancer, intense physical pain, war, the Holocaust, the loss of a mother, combat trauma, morphine, sexuality, and voluntary ending of life. This is an analysis of a work of art, not a remote diagnosis of historical figures and not evidence that the imagined meeting of Freud and Lewis occurred exactly this way.
Freud's Last Session (2023) by Matt Brown imagines a conversation history does not confirm: on September 3, 1939, when Great Britain declares war on Germany, 83-year-old Sigmund Freud receives C.S. Lewis, a writer and Oxford professor, at his London home. One defends atheism and psychoanalysis, the other—Christian faith. But the real drama begins when their arguments cease to be theories and touch upon the body, loss, fear, and close relationships.
The film is based on Mark St. Germain's play, inspired by Armand Nicholi's book The Question of God. It is known only that shortly before his death, Freud met an unnamed young Oxford lecturer. The version about Lewis is a dramatic hypothesis. Therefore, the film should be read not as a biographical protocol, but as an intellectual chamber drama: what happens when two people use their worldviews both as support and as defense?
Who is the main character here: Freud, Lewis, or the conversation itself?
Formally, the film has two central opponents. However, the dramatic pressure is more strongly focused on Freud. He is an exile from Vienna, seriously ill with jaw cancer, dependent on his daughter's help, and understands that he has little time left. He invites Lewis seemingly for a debate about God, but gradually it becomes clear that he is also arguing with his own mortality.
Lewis goes through a contrasting arc. He arrives as a younger man, an adherent of faith and a possible object of analysis, but he does not remain a passive student. He turns the questions back to Freud, talks about his experiences in the trenches, the death of his mother, fear, and love. In the end, the "session" does not belong to one doctor: each analyzes the other, each defends himself, and each, for a moment, refuses the role of a person who already has a final answer.
Freud's dramatic scenario: controlling meaning when you cannot control the body
Freud meets Lewis in a space where almost everything is subordinated to his order: his office, the couch, his collection of antiquities, precise questions, irony. Intellect is his strength, his profession, and his way of not being helpless. He quickly translates the guest's words into hidden motives, sexuality, relationships with parents, and fear of death.
But the body repeatedly interrupts this control. The prosthesis causes pain, blood and spasms force him to stop the conversation, and the air raid siren reminds him that the outside world is also not subject to explanation. Freud can interpret fear, but he cannot cancel pain. He can criticize religious solace, but he cannot make death an abstraction.
His hidden rule can be formulated as follows: if I can explain the origin of faith, love, and fear, they will not have power over me. The dramatic change does not lie in Freud's conversion. It happens when explanation ceases to be the only possible form of contact.
First defense: turning the interlocutor into a clinical case
Freud has the advantage of the host and the famous doctor. He asks questions as if he already knows what lies behind the answer. When Lewis talks about God, Freud looks for a father figure; when about morality—repressed sexuality; when about love—dependency and fear of loneliness.
This demonstrates the power of psychological language and, at the same time, its risk. Interpretation can open up new meaning, but it can also become a way to deprive another person of the right to define their own experience. If any disagreement is declared as resistance, and any belief as a symptom, the theory becomes invincible only because it does not allow for verification.
Lewis resists not by rejecting psychology, but by reciprocity. He asks if atheism can also be a psychological response to pain, disappointment, or a father's betrayal. At this moment, the framework changes: the doctor is no longer standing outside the human drama.
Lewis: faith not as the absence of doubt, but as a way to remain in relationship
The film does not portray Lewis as a person without fear. His faith went through the early death of his mother, the harsh school experience, the trenches of World War I, and the death of his friend Paddy Moore. In Lewis's official biography, there is indeed a path from the loss of childhood faith to theism and Christianity.
His position is strong not when he delivers ready-made apologetics, but when he admits: suffering does not cease to be suffering just because a person believes. Faith does not give him a complete explanation of war or Freud's pain. It gives him a language in which love, freedom, and responsibility are not reduced to chemistry or a defense mechanism.
At the same time, the film allows us to see the protective function of faith. A confident formula can close doubt just as a psychoanalytic formula can—helplessness. Lewis's maturity is shown in his ability not only to persuade, but to listen to a person who is dying and does not want their pain to be used as evidence for someone else's rightness.
The Dispute About God: Two Biographies Under the Mask of Universal Arguments
Freud and Lewis talk about the existence of God, but their positions have a biographical temperature. For Freud, religion is associated with illusion, dependence, and paternal authority. For Lewis, it is associated with conversion after a period of atheism, moral imagination, and the experience of love.
The film does not give a logical winner, and this is its psychological advantage. It shows that worldview is not just a set of theses. It is also a way to organize experience, withstand uncertainty, and decide whom or what to trust.
A useful question after the film is not "who won?" but what function does my conviction serve right now? Does it help me act responsibly? Does it give me support in the face of the unknown? Or does it protect me from contact with the doubt, shame, and pain of another person?
Freud's Pain: When the Body Destroys the Illusion of an All-Powerful Mind
The body, memory, and death place a limit on intellectual control. Original MriyaRun illustration.
The jaw cancer in the film is not just a biographical detail. Pain sets the rhythm of the conversation. It limits the language of a person who built their life on words and makes dependence on others inevitable. Freud must allow Lewis to see what he wanted to control privately.
Chronic and oncological pain is not "just psychological." Psychological processes can influence the experience of pain, but they do not negate medical reality. The film is important precisely because it does not turn Freud's suffering into a beautiful metaphor: intellectual freedom exists alongside physical dependence.
His path can be described as a transition from the question "how do I defeat the argument?" to the question "how do I remain myself when the body and time take control?" The film's answer is not heroic. It is short moments of humor, help, honesty, and the presence of another person.
War Outside the Window: Collective Catastrophe Enters the Private Office
The radio reports on the German invasion of Poland and Britain's entry into the war. The air raid siren forces the heroes to leave the intellectual safety of the office. History does not allow them to argue in a vacuum.
Freud is a Jewish refugee who has just escaped from Nazi Vienna. Lewis is a veteran of World War I who knows the fear of the trenches not from books. Therefore, the question of evil is not theoretical for either of them. One asks how a good God allows mass suffering; the other asks whether the denial of God can provide a sufficient basis for moral protest.
The siren also performs a dramatic grounding function. When the argument becomes too beautiful, reality returns the body: run, hide, wait, not know. In a crisis, people rarely live within pure theory. They need both meaning and concrete security.
Lewis and War Trauma: Courage Does Not Mean the Absence of Fear
Flashbacks to World War I show a young Lewis under fire and the death of Paddy Moore. The sounds of airplanes and sirens in 1939 bring back the past not as a calm memory, but as a physically colored reaction.
This can be read as an artistic depiction of traumatic memory, but not as a basis for diagnosing historical Lewis. The film compresses the biography and uses flashbacks for dramaturgy. What is important is the pattern itself: the present signal of danger can activate old experience before a person has time to explain it.
Lewis does not stop fearing because of faith. His support is shown in the fact that he can notice fear, remain in contact, and act. This distinguishes courage from emotional numbness.
Mrs. Moore: Love, Promise, or Mutual Dependence?
Lewis's connection with Janie King Moore, the mother of a fallen friend, is presented as an uncomfortable riddle. After the war, Lewis lived with her and cared for her, fulfilling a promise made to Paddy. Freud immediately sexualizes and analyzes this connection.
Psychologically, it's more interesting not to guess "what really happened" but to see the conflict of loyalties. The promise can be an expression of love, a way to cope with the guilt of the survivor, a defense against loneliness, or all of these at once. Human relationships rarely have only one function.
The film raises an important question: when does care support the freedom of both, and when does it turn into a role that is scary to leave? The answer does not give the right to devalue attachment. It invites checking reciprocity, consent, the possibility of saying "no" and the value of constant self-sacrifice.
Anna Freud: Daughter, Colleague, and Person in the Father's Orbit
Anna is not just a supporting character in the film. She is a psychoanalyst who has already created her own direction of work with children, survived the Gestapo arrest, and organizes the family's safety. At the same time, her father controls her time, personal life, and the way she speaks about herself.
The historical fact that Sigmund Freud analyzed his own daughter today raises obvious ethical questions about dual roles, power, and the impossibility of a neutral framework. The film makes this problem part of the drama: Anna strives to be a separate adult, but constantly returns to the role of an indispensable daughter.
Her internal rule sounds something like this: if I stop being necessary for my father, I betray him and lose my place. The complexity lies in the fact that her care is genuine. Autonomy does not require stopping loving; it requires that love not be the only reason to refuse one's own life.
Dorothy Burlingham: Closeness That Cannot Be Kept in the Corridor Indefinitely
Anna Freud between devotion to her father and the right to an intimate life with Dorothy. Original MriyaRun illustration.
Dorothy wants their relationship with Anna to exist not only outside the father's gaze. The film presents them as a couple, and the Freud Museum London directly calls Freud and Lewis's meeting imaginary and examines cultural representations of the long-term relationship between Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham.
Dorothy's psychological conflict is not reduced to jealousy. She faces a system where the father's need is always declared more urgent, and their closeness is secondary or invisible. Her demand is a demand for reality: the relationship cannot develop if one person endlessly waits for permission from a third.
In the finale, Anna brings Dorothy to her father and takes her hand. This is not a magical solution to a multi-year dependence. It is a small behavioral act: to stop asking for recognition only mentally and to show one's own choice in a real contact.
Father and Daughter: Love, Control, and the Fear of Being Abandoned
Freud may talk about freedom from illusions, but he finds it difficult to withstand Anna's individuality. Her closeness with Dorothy threatens not only his views on sexuality. It calls into question the family system where Anna is an assistant, caregiver, student, and continuer of the cause.
Control easily masquerades as care: "I know better what's good for you," "it's not the right time now," "you need me." But the father's need does not cancel the subjectivity of the adult daughter. Even a serious illness does not give automatic rights to control her intimate life.
At the same time, it would be simplistic to make Freud only a tyrant, and Anna only a victim. They are deeply connected, together survived persecution and emigration, and work in a shared intellectual field. It is the reality of love that makes separation difficult.
Humor and Aggression: How Two Men Regulate Closeness
Freud provokes, Lewis responds with wit. Their humor defuses tension and simultaneously allows them to attack without directly acknowledging aggression. A joke can be a bridge, or a way of not saying: "I'm scared," "I'm offended," "I don't know."
In the best scenes, they stop being symbols of "science" and "faith" and become two people testing the boundaries of safe closeness. Will the other withstand my disagreement? Will they use my confession against me? Can you respect a conversational partner without agreeing with their worldview?
The therapeutic value of the dialogue here is not in victory, but in the ability to stay together after conflict. This is a skill that many public discussions lack: distinguishing criticism of an idea from the destruction of a person.
Freud's Dramatic Arc: Seven Steps from Duel to Meeting
- Invitation of the opponent. Freud sets up an intellectual duel in which he expects to control the rules.
- Quick analysis. He translates Lewis's faith into childhood needs, sexuality, and fear.
- Return of the gaze. Lewis asks what losses and hurts support Freud's own convictions.
- Intrusion of the body and war. Pain, blood, radio, and sirens break the safe distance of theory.
- Exposure of family blindness. The theme of Anna shows that a great analyst doesn't always see control in his own home.
- Help without capitulation. Lewis supports Freud physically without demanding that he change his worldview.
- Uncertain farewell. Neither converts the other, but both leave the conversation less closed in their own role.
This is not an "atheist became a believer" arc or "psychoanalysis defeated religion." It's a story about how, on the brink of death, a person allows an opponent to be, for a short time, not a problem to be solved, but another subject.
What the Film Says About Defense Mechanisms
Freud often uses intellectualization: he translates fear, pain, and attachment into a system of concepts. Lewis sometimes responds with moralization: risking to turn a complex experience into a confirmation of the correct ethical position. Anna may use self-denial as a way to avoid conflict autonomy, and the father — rationalization, calling control care.
These concepts are not labels for the characters. Defenses are necessary for the psyche: they help to survive what is currently too intense. The problem arises when one way becomes the only one and the person loses flexibility.
A mature question doesn't sound like "how to get rid of defenses?" but "what are they protecting me from, what is their cost, and do I have a safer alternative right now?".
Historical Truth and Artistic Fiction: What's Important Not to Mix Up
- Freud's meeting with C.S. Lewis is not confirmed. There is a record of an unnamed young Oxford lecturer; the film builds on this an imaginary situation.
- The events take place on September 3, 1939, the day Britain entered World War II, but the dialogues and most of the scenes are created by the authors.
- Flashbacks compress biographies and connect events that were not part of one "last session."
- The relationship between Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham has a historical basis, but their private conversations in the film are a dramatic reconstruction.
- The views of the heroes should not be automatically equated with the whole of contemporary psychoanalysis, psychology, atheism, or Christianity.
This critical framework does not diminish the value of the film. On the contrary, it allows us to use it honestly: as a laboratory of questions, not as a history textbook.
Mini-Practice “Two Truths in One Room”
Choose a conflict where it's important for you to be right. Divide the page into four parts:
- My Thesis. What do I believe and what facts support it?
- My Biography. What experience makes this thesis emotionally important to me?
- The Other Person's Truth. What in their position can I understand without agreeing?
- Contact. What one question can I ask without a hidden goal of winning?
Finish the sentence: "I can remain in my convictions and at the same time not turn another person into a symptom, an enemy, or a project of salvation." If the conflict involves violence, danger, or systemic humiliation, dialogue is not an obligation: safety and boundaries come first.
From Film Analysis to MriyaRun Tools
- Metaphorical Cards “My Myth: The Hero's Journey” help to see one's own story at the edge: what is ending, what role needs to be let go of, and what one wants to pass on.
- The “Self-Discovery” Journal-Course supports the question “who am I outside of my professional role, beliefs, and the expectations of loved ones?”.
- The EQ Emotions Journal provides a structure for distinguishing fear, grief, anger, shame, hope, and helplessness—instead of immediately turning them into arguments.
- The CBT SHIFT Workbook helps to separate the event, automatic thought, emotion, action, and alternative perspective without forced “positive thinking”.
- Metaphorical Cards “I Have the Right” are relevant to Anna's line: the right to closeness, individual choice, boundaries, and a life that is not reduced to a function for parents.
MriyaRun tools support psychological education and self-reflection. They do not replace psychotherapy, palliative care, medical treatment, spiritual support, or crisis intervention.
Sources and Limits of Interpretation
- Sony Pictures Classics: official page for Freud’s Last Session — synopsis, director, screenwriters, and cast.
- Official screenplay of the film — sequence of scenes and dramatic lines.
- Anna Freud Centre: history of Anna Freud — her work with children, escape from Vienna, and professional contribution.
- Freud Museum London: Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham in cultural memory.
- C. S. Lewis Foundation: biographical timeline — Oxford, the war, Paddy Moore, and Lewis's later life with the Moore family.
- AP: review of the film and historical context — meeting with an unnamed Oxford professor and the artistic nature of the dialogue.
The film simplifies the history of psychoanalysis, religious arguments, and personal relationships for the sake of a chamber drama. It does not prove or disprove the existence of God, does not give a complete assessment of Freud's legacy, and cannot replace biographical sources. Its strength lies elsewhere: it shows that at the end of life, even the strongest theory encounters what it cannot fully control—the body, love, the freedom of another person, and death.