Sophie Freud, Critic of Her Grandfather’s Gospel, Dies at 97

Many years after her grandfather’s loss of life from most cancers in 1939, Professor Freud thought-about lots of his basic theories, from “penis envy” to transference, to be outdated — “sensible in addition to questionable,” as she put it

Whereas he typically challenged the Victorian period’s patriarchal view of feminine sexuality, she wrote, “he mirrored in his theories the assumption that girls had been secondary and weren’t the norm.” As for his conclusion that “girls are perpetually falling in love with their male therapists,” she mentioned, he sanitized such attachments as transference.

“He mentioned it doesn’t matter, girls recover from it afterward,” Professor Freud mentioned, “however I disagree. Ladies then go to a different therapist to recover from that one.”

She ratcheted up her criticism in an interview for a Canadian tv movie, “Neighbours: Freud and Hitler in Vienna” (2003), saying, “In my eyes, each Adolf Hitler and my grandfather had been false prophets of the twentieth century.” They shared, in her phrases, “the ambition to persuade different males of the one and solely reality they’d encounter.”

“By no means might he be incorrect,” she mentioned.

Miriam Sophie Freud was born in Vienna on Aug. 6, 1924. Her father, Jean Martin Freud (often called Martin), was Sigmund Freud’s eldest son and a lawyer who grew to become the director of Dr. Freud’s Psychoanalytic Publishing Home. Her mom, Ernestine (Drucker) Freud, was a speech therapist who was often called Esti.

Sophie tried to profit from her childhood, regardless of her dad and mom’ feuding and the animosity between her and her older brother, Walter. Solely when she was enrolled as an adolescent in Vienna’s most progressive women’ college, the Schwarzwaldschule, did she excel as a scholar.