Decades after her grandfather’s dying from most cancers in 1939, Professor Freud thought-about many of his basic theories, from “penis envy” to transference, to be outdated — “brilliant as well as questionable,” as she put it
While he typically challenged the Victorian period’s patriarchal view of feminine sexuality, she wrote, “he mirrored in his theories the belief that women were secondary and were not the norm.” As for his conclusion that “women are forever falling in love with their male therapists,” she stated, he sanitized such attachments as transference.
“He said it doesn’t matter, women get over it afterward,” Professor Freud stated, “but I disagree. Women then go to another therapist to get over 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, both Adolf Hitler and my grandfather were false prophets of the 20th century.” They shared, in her phrases, “the ambition to convince other men of the one and only truth they had come upon.”
“Never could he be wrong,” she stated.
Miriam Sophie Freud was born in Vienna on Aug. 6, 1924. Her father, Jean Martin Freud (referred to as Martin), was Sigmund Freud’s eldest son and a lawyer who grew to become the director of Dr. Freud’s Psychoanalytic Publishing House. Her mom, Ernestine (Drucker) Freud, was a speech therapist who was referred to as Esti.
Sophie tried to take advantage of of her childhood, regardless of her mother and father’ feuding and the animosity between her and her older brother, Walter. Only when she was enrolled as a young person in Vienna’s most progressive ladies’ faculty, the Schwarzwaldschule, did she excel as a pupil.
