[Phiwise_]

>It is true that Lewis did not seem to have a high opinion of sociologists

This also seems correct going by a couple of his current issues essays. Two spring to mind: The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment, where he says something like "Only the expert Penologist, let barbarous things have barbarous names, can tell us if a punishment is useful to deter", and Vivisection, which ends something like "[So it is up to us to make the difficult distinction of what laboratory animal suffering is necessary and what is excessive to improve human life], but it is up to the Police to determine what is presently being done.", though I haven't read either of these in a while. He's also rather sour on the time's study of people in general, and the psychotherapy in particular, in both HumanTheory and sections of his three part Abolition of Man, although the second gets much more abstractly philosophical.

[smithza]

He was an early detractor of Freud for example. Forgive me for not keeping my sources.

[ChainOfFools]

No you're absolutely correct. His criticism of Freud anticipated Murray Gell-Mann, or rather his eponymous amnesia effect, by at least a generation.

It's been quite a few years so the exact phrasing escapes me now, but was something to the effect that Freud demonstrated a pattern of confidently talking well past his own level of understanding of certain topics even in the company of actual experts in the material, And thus although Lewis couldn't judge to what extent this was a factor in Freud's own claimed area of expertise, he observed that when Freud ventured to hold forth on something CS Lewis did know quite a lot about, namely, languages, he found him to be quite the amateur. Freud is somewhat obliquely caricatured thrpuhh the character of Sigismund, a personifcation of the more cargo cultish, callous and anti-humanist excesses of self-indulgent charlatanry marring the then-nascent psychotherapy movement as a whole.