A Battle Couched in Belief: ‘Freud’s Last Session’ Reviewed
by Wesley G. Pippert
When I went to watch Freud’s Last Session, I thought I’d see a tell-all session on a couch. Indeed, there was a couch. But the 80-minute play, which is being staged at Theater J in Washington, DC was far more than psychoanalysis: it was a duel between the titans of two powerful belief systems, matching Sigmund Freud, in the last days of his life, in a head-to-head, heart-to-heart debate with a recent convert to the Christian faith named C.S. Lewis.
No one impacted the studies of the mind more than Freud (played by Rich Foucheux), who practiced in Vienna and was the son of Jewish parents. As Dr. Elizabeth Fritsch, past president of the Contemporary Freudian Society, has noted, Freud contributed an entire vocabulary to the fieldh—including repression, the Oedipus complex, libido, projection, slips...