The Great Debate

THIS book began as a series of lectures for undergraduates, taught for 25 years at Harvard College and at the Medical School. The course is both demanding and rewarding, which I believe for three reasons. First, I have a young friend who took the course, who raved about it to me in detail, and whose life it changed, for the better and forever. Second, I am an “adviser” on an attempt to make a film version of the course’s idea, and so have learned of its instructor’s reputation for rigor (although I do not know Armand Nicholi personally). And finally, Dr. Nicholi—psychiatrist, professor at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, and clinician in private practice—shows himself in this book as a teacher of both great intellectual range and contagious devotion to disinterested argument.

The book’s design is simple: In its nine main chapters, Nicholi’s protagonists, C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud, treat— more or less alternately—such major intellectual topics as God, happiness, pain, and death. Nicholi has a gift for apt and ample quotation, and along the way provides biographical vignettes and insights of the kind that are indispensable in a book about two people who so frequently used themselves as data. His writing, at once allusive and lean, arouses a thirst: Would that we were in the Nicholi classroom to hear the professor’s ready interjections, so fitting are they, and to make our own interjections.

JC

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James Como

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THIS book began as a series of lectures for undergraduates, taught for 25 years at Harvard College and at the Medical School. The course is both demanding and rewarding, which I believe for three reasons. First, I have a young friend who took the course, who raved about it to me in detail, and whose life it changed, for the better and forever. Second, I am an “adviser” on an attempt to make a film version of the course’s idea, and so have learned of its instructor’s reputation for rigor (although I do not know Armand Nicholi personally). And finally, Dr. Nicholi—psychiatrist, professor at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, and clinician in private practice—shows himself in this book as a teacher of both great intellectual range and contagious devotion to disinterested argument.

The book’s design is simple: In its nine main chapters, Nicholi’s protagonists, C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud, treat— more or less alternately—such major intellectual topics as God, happiness, pain, and death. Nicholi has a gift for apt and ample quotation, and along the way provides biographical vignettes and insights of the kind that are indispensable in a book about two people who so frequently used themselves as data. His writing, at once allusive and lean, arouses a thirst: Would that we were in the Nicholi classroom to hear the professor’s ready interjections, so fitting are they, and to make our own interjections.