C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Discuss Happiness and the Source of Our Greatest Enjoyment in Life

Study Subject: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

PART II of the Book.  Chapter 5. 

DICTIONARY DEFINITIONS

Happiness -

• Characterized by luck or good fortune   (American Heritage Dictionary)
• An emotional state, a feeling, a positive mood - e.g., expressing the mood of one who is pleased or delighted. (Webster's Collegiate Dictionary) 
• Any condition of good spirits, temporary or sustained. (American Heritage Dictionary)
• Synonyms - glad, cheerful, lighthearted, joyful, joyous.
• Antonym - sadness

  The intent and purpose of peoples lives is "they strive after happiness; they want to become happy and to remain so."

Sigmund Freud in Civilization and It's Discontents 

Freud wonders from where a widespread belief in a Supreme Being -- a belief so powerful  that it overwhelms science and reason.  He concludes that happiness for man was not included any plan of creation (Page 103).

C.S. Lewis explains happiness in terms of relationships, and contrasts it with the necessary potential consequences of free will:

The happiness which God designs for his higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water.  And for that they must be free."  (Pg 104).

God cannot give us happiness apart from himself, because it is not there.  There is no such thing. (Pg 105)

We discussed that we were made as a love object for God:

Revelation 4:11

1 Corinthians 8:6

Colossians 1:16

We discussed the idea of perspective

For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.

The Magician's Nephew - C.S. Lewis