I didn't log in yesterday and so I don't know the quotation to which you are referring.
I think you are partially correct. Lewis was distant from his real feelings from the time of his mother's death in 1907 until he finished the book Miracles in 1945. Its last four chapters, the death of Charles Williams, and the writing of The Great Divorce seem to have begun the thaw in his frozen feelings that allows him to begin his autobiography Surprised by Joy and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at the same time (the summer of 1948). How very significant, then, that the principal motif in LWW is the 100 years of winter!
Lewis doesn't meet Ms. Gresham until September of 1952, so I don't think you can attribute as much to her as you are inclined.
I append an extract from my book that shows how the Chronicles reveal how much Lewis knew about psychological pain.
[signed]
Paul F. Ford
(author of the Companion to Narnia and the Pocket Companion to Narnia )
AUTOBIOGRAPHY, AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ALLUSIONS The pattern of parentlessness in the Chronicles is the deepest and most constant allusion to Lewis’s own childhood, which was marked by the death of his mother when he was nine and his troubled relationship with his father that complicated Lewis’s YOUTH. Only in the fleeting scenes of Digory’s mother’s recovery of her health and her playing with Polly and Digory and of the meeting of TIRIAN with his father ERLIAN does the reader catch a glimpse of the kind of healthy relationship of parents, indeed ADULTS, and CHILDREN that is so notable in the works of Lewis’s mentor, George MacDonald. Thus Aravis’s father is heartless; Shasta’s “father” is sullen and mean (the boy has lost his mother and does not know his real father); Caspian is an orphan and his father figure, MIRAZ, is a tyrant; Digory’s father is in India; and Mr. PEVENSIE is frequently absent.
Digory’s desperate desire to help his seriously ill mother reflects Lewis’s crisis over his own mother’s illness, during which he experienced the appeal of MAGIC and failure of petitionary PRAYER, the immediate cause of his abandoning any FAITH in an all-powerful, all-good God. Lewis revisited this terrible time in his life at the time of his wife’s death and wrestled with his belief in an all-good God, the thought of SUICIDE briefly flitting across his mind as he worried that humanity is like rats in God’s trap or in God’s laboratory, with God enjoying the PAIN He causes us.
