But Freud spent much of her life at odds with her famous grandfather, Sigmund, and his theories, and thus prided herself on a 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 indulgence that I can’t believe in it.” Freud died earlier this month, aged 97, after a long life shaped by the great upheaval of the 20th century and the constant 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, Ernestina, was a speech therapist. Growing up, every Sunday included a visit to her grandfather’s apartment at Berggasse 19. A governess would take Sophie to the study for a 15-minute audience with the great professor, whom she loved and understood from an early age to be godlike—even if she couldn’t quite say why. Sigmund was strict and by then was suffering from cancer, but he gave money to his granddaughter to go to the theater. “He was like, ‘Are you a good girl?’ Sophie recalls. “I was taught to be very in awe of him.” Her own family life was miserable. Her parents did not get along well and Sophie later wrote that “quarrels, tears and violent hysterical scenes were the background music of my childhood”. In 1938, after Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, Sophie and her mother settled in Paris. They were forced to flee again when the Nazis invaded two years later. Mother and daughter made 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 journalist Edward Bernays, meant that Sophie attended Radcliffe College and studied psychology. He 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. He placed special emphasis on helping single mothers. Sophie also taught for decades at Simmons College in Boston, where she chaired the human behavior program. Until she reluctantly gave it up at age 77, she could be seen cruising around campus on a red scooter. If Sigmund Freud believed in examining the unconscious to understand the adult, his granddaughter relied on fate. He once said he believed people only had 5 percent control over their lifetime – the rest was chance. He dismissed Freud’s concept of penis envy as nonsensical and called the Oedipus Complex “obsolete”. An early feminist, she seemed to particularly resent Sigmund’s claim that only men could experience true passion. In 1998, he 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,” he said in 2003. So wedded was Sigmund Freud to what he saw as a single truth, he said, that “he could never error”. . For some observers, the intensity of her disagreement with her grandfather was, itself, Freudian. Her own marriage, to Paul Loewenstein, a fellow Jewish immigrant who had escaped from a French concentration camp, fared better than her parents’. They raised three children – Dania, Andrea and George. However, she filed for divorce after 40 years, coolly deciding that the union was no longer satisfactory. Later, Sophie made a determined effort to reconnect with her aunt Anna, Sigmund’s daughter and heir-designate, even taking a break in England to do so. “I needed Tante Anna’s blessing before I could rightfully claim the family legacy I had betrayed and yet remained loyal to her core,” she explained in her memoir. Even after her retirement, Sophie continued to teach at Simmons. She traveled a lot, often alone. For exercise, he regularly walked around nearby Walden Lake and swam in its waters—the same where another eccentric, Henry David Thoreau, famously thought about independence and self-reliance. Joshua Chaffin
