PSYCHIATRIC SOCIAL WORKER CHALLENGED GRANDFATHER’S IDEAS
Sophie Freud, who fled the Nazi onslaught in Europe and escaped to the United States, where, as a professor and psychiatric social worker, she challenged the therapeutic foundation of her grandfather Sigmund’s theories of psychoanalysis, died June 3 at her home in Lincoln, Mass. The last surviving grandchild of Sigmund Freud, she was 97.
Her daughter Andrea Freud Loewenstein said the cause was pancreatic cancer.
Sophie Freud, who taught psychology at Simmons College (now Simmons University) in Boston, devoted her career as a psychosociologist to the protection of children and to introducing feminism into the field of social work.
One of the few surviving members of her family to have known her grandfather personally, she was raised in what her mother called an “upper-middleclass Jewish ghetto” in Vienna
in a turbulent household in which her parents led separate lives and her grandparents, aunts and other relatives from all sides mingled.
“I was designated as a Freud, a distinction which carried its own problems,” Freud wrote in “Living in the Shadow of the Freud Family” (2007), an amalgam of letters.
Still, she survived her parents’ estrangement, bitter feuds with her brother, a rocky relationship and reconciliation with her mother, 40 years of marriage until she divorced her husband (“because I could not imagine becoming old with a man at my side”) and raising three successful children — all without ever having undergone psychotherapy herself.
“I’m very skeptical about much of psychoanalysis,” she told The Boston Globe in 2002. “I think it’s such a narcissistic indulgence that I cannot believe in it.”
Freud and several of Sigmund Freud’s other grandchildren visited him every
Sunday either at his country villas or at Berggasse 19, his home and office in Vienna. They were ushered in promptly at 12:45 p.m. for a 15-minute audience before lunch was served punctually at 1 p.m. (Inheriting his punctuality, Sophie Freud kept an alarm clock at the front of her college classroom.)
While fuzzily whiskered, Sigmund Freud was not remembered by his granddaughter as palpably warm. But each Sunday until she was 14, he would engage in small talk with her and give her 8 shillings, enough to buy a ticket to the Burgtheater, she said.
Miriam Sophie Freud was born in Vienna on Aug. 6, 1924. Her father, Jean Martin Freud (known as Martin), was Sigmund Freud’s eldest son and a lawyer who became the director of Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalytic Publishing House. Sophie Freud’s mother, Ernestine (Drucker) Freud, was a speech therapist who was known as Esti.