Sophie Freud
Psychosociologist who dismissed the ideas of her grandfather Sigmund as the work of a ‘false prophet’
SOPHIE FREUD, who has died aged 97, was a social worker and psychosociologist who spent much of her life answering questions about her famous grandfather Sigmund Freud, the “father of psychoanalysis” – and she did not hesitate to disagree with his theories.
Freud is probably best known for his work on sexuality – the Oedipus complex, penis envy, infantile sexuality, the anal phase and so on. But his last surviving granddaughter maintained that he understood nothing about female sexuality.
“For him, man was the norm and woman was some other strange abnormality,” she told an interviewer in 1999. She took particular issue with the concept of “penis envy”, which according to Freudian theory is a stage in female sexual development, during the transition from an attachment to the mother to competition with the mother for the attention and affection of the father; young girls supposedly experience anxiety when realising that they do not have a penis.
Many women, Sophie Freud conceded, thought it would be advantageous to be a man, but this was down to “the privileges men have, not their penis”. She regarded psychoanalysis as a “narcissistic indulgence”.
Her view of human psychological development was based on sociology: “I feel that our lives are mostly determined by circumstances, politics, economics, where you happen to grow up and the privilege of your childhood and later life.”
As a professor of social work at Simmons University, Boston, her most withering assessment of a student’s work was that it was “very Freudian”.
One of two children, Miriam Sophie Freud was born in Vienna on August 6 1924. Her father, Martin, a lawyer, was Sigmund’s eldest son. Her mother, Ernestine “Esti” (née Drucker) was a difficult, unhappy woman so obsessed with her own beauty that her daughter, aged six, resolved never to use make-up or wear scent.
She recalled that she and other Freud grandchildren would visit Sigmund every Sunday for a 15-minute audience. The household in which she grew up was a Freudian psychoanalyst’s dream. Her parents did not get on and she had a fractious relationship with her older brother Walter. “Quarrels, tears and violent hysterical scenes were the background music of my childhood,” she recalled.
She attended a progressive Viennese school, the Schwarzwaldschule, until Germany’s annexation of Austria in March 1938, after which the family split up. Sophie and Esti left Vienna for Paris, while Martin, Walter, Sigmund and other family members fled to London.
In the summer of 1940 the Germans entered Paris. Having no car, Sophie and her mother fled the city by bicycle and pedalled 400 miles to unoccupied Nice, from where they made their way to Casablanca, and finally to New York. They arrived in November 1942, homeless and almost penniless.
Sophie’s uncle, Edward Bernays, a PR pioneer and nephew of Sigmund Freud, arranged for her to study Psychology at Radcliffe, the women’s college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and paid her tuition fees.
Sophie resented the way her father took no interest in her: “I had a very hard time getting through college with absolutely no money. I used to think he could have found ways of helping me.” Instead she made ends meet by working as a babysitter.
In 1945 she married Paul Loewenstein, an engineer and Jewish émigré, and after graduation from Radcliffe took a master’s in social work from Simmons College in 1948.
She went on to work in psychiatric hospitals and as an adoption specialist at a welfare agency. After taking a doctorate in social welfare from Brandeis University, in 1970 she was appointed a professor at Simmons and head of the university’s human behaviour programme. There, she was credited with introducing feminism into the field of social work.
She officially retired in 1992 but continued to teach at Simmons, and later at the Institute for Lifelong Learning at Brandeis.
Family relationships continued to be fraught. In a 1988 memoir, My Three Mothers and Other Passions, she explored her complicated relationships with her mother, her maternal aunt, and her paternal aunt Anna, Sigmund Freud’s youngest daughter, whom she had got to know during a sabbatical in England.
In 2007 she published Living in the Shadow of the Freud Family, an expansion of an autobiography written by her mother, who had died in 1980. In the family, Sophie recalled, it was de rigueur to subscribe to Freudianism, which she described as “a kind of belief system that demands loyalty if you want to have a feeling of belonging”. When her brother Walter heard of her criticism of Freud’s theories, “he said to me, ‘Without grandfather, the Nazis would have made lampshades with your skin’.”
In 2003 she said: “In my eyes, both Adolf Hitler and my grandfather were false prophets of the 20th century.” They shared “the ambition to convince other men of the one and only truth they had come upon”.
Sophie Freud’s marriage to Paul Loewenstein was dissolved in 1986. She is survived by their two daughters and a son.
Sophie Freud, born August 6 1924, died June 3 2022