The things that might have surfaced if only Sophie Freud had slipped off onto the couch for a session of psychoanalysis just once. There was the flight from Europe during the war, the estrangement from the uncaring father and the conflicted feelings for her mother. Over all loomed the shadow of her famous family, which both uplifted and tormented her.
But Freud spent much of her life in opposition to her famous grandfather Sigmund and his theories, and so she prided herself on her lifelong refusal to submit to psychoanalysis. “I’m very skeptical of a lot of psychoanalysis,” she told the Boston Globe in 2002. “I think it’s such a narcissistic obsession that I can’t believe it.”
Freud died earlier this month, aged 97, after a long life shaped by the great upheavals of the 20th century and the enduring tension between a heavy family legacy and an independent spirit.
Miriam Sophie Freud was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Vienna in 1924. Her father was Sigmund’s eldest son, Martin, a lawyer who would take over his father’s publishing house. Her mother, Ernestine, was a speech therapist. Growing up, every Sunday included a visit to his grandfather’s apartment at 19 Berggasse.
A governess would take Sophie to the study for a 15-minute audience with the great professor, whom she loved and knew from a young age that he was like God – even if she couldn’t say exactly why. Sigmund was strict and at the time suffering from cancer, but he would give his granddaughter money to go to the theater. “He was like, ‘Are you a good girl?'” recalls Sophie. “I was taught to be in awe of him.”
Her own family life was unhappy. Her parents did not get along well and Sophie later wrote that “quarrels, tears and violent hysterical scenes were the musical background of my childhood”.
In 1938, after Nazi-ruled Germany annexed Austria, Sophie and her mother moved to Paris. They were forced to flee again when the Nazis invaded two years later. A mother and daughter managed a close escape by cycling some 400 miles to Nice. From there they traveled to New York.
Although they were poor, the patronage of an uncle, the pioneering publicist Edward Bernays, meant that Sophie attended Radcliffe College and studied psychology. She would go on to earn a master’s degree in social work and then a doctorate, working in clinics, psychiatric hospitals and as an adoption specialist. She placed a special emphasis on helping single mothers.
Sophie also taught for decades at Simmons College in Boston, where she directed the Human Behavior Program. Until she reluctantly gave it up at age 77, she could be seen riding around campus on a red motor scooter.
If Sigmund Freud believed in exploring the unconscious to understand the adult, his granddaughter leaned on fate. She once said that she believes that people only have 5 percent control over the course of their lives – the rest is chance.
She dismissed Freud’s concept of penis envy as silly and called the Oedipus complex “outdated.” An early feminist, she seems to have taken particular offense to Sigmund’s assertion that only men can experience true passion. In 1998, she published a book, My Three Mothers and Other Passions, which served as a rebuttal.
“In my eyes, both Adolf Hitler and my grandfather were false prophets of the 20th century,” she said in 2003. Sigmund Freud was so tied to what he believed to be the only truth, she said, that “he could never to be wrong” . To some observers, the intensity of her disagreement with her grandfather was itself Freudian.
Her own marriage to Paul Loewenstein, a fellow Jewish émigré who had escaped from a French concentration camp, fared better than her parents’. They raised three children, Denmark, Andrea and George. Still, she asked for a divorce after 40 years, coolly deciding that the union no longer satisfied her.
Sophie later makes a determined effort to reconnect with her aunt Anna, Sigmund’s daughter and heiress-designate, even taking a leave of absence to England to do so. “I needed Tante Anna’s blessing before I could rightfully reclaim the family inheritance I had passed on, but I remained true to my core,” she explained in her memoir.
Even after her retirement, Sophie continued to teach at Simmons. She traveled a lot, often alone. For exercise, she regularly walked around nearby Walden Lake and swam in its waters—the same ones in which another eccentric, Henry David Thoreau, mused about independence and self-reliance. Joshua Chaffin
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