One of you asked me whether it was a great burden for me to be Freud's granddaughter.

But in Boston nowadays, it's my grandfather, who's my grandfather, rather than I'm being his granddaughter.

Welcome to the Carlet Psychiatry podcast, keeping psychiatry honest since 2003.

I'm Chris Sagan, the editor-in-chief of the Carlatte Psychiatry Report.

And I'm Kelly Newsom, a psychiatric MP and a dedicated reader of every issue.

On June 3, 2022, Sigmund Freud's last living grandchild died at the age of 97.

But Sophie Freud did not carry the family torch.

A social worker and therapist, Sophie challenged the idea that human behavior

is guided by hidden unconscious forces. Sophie took a practical approach to psychotherapy. She once told

the Boston Globe that psychoanalysis was a narcissistic indulgence. But that was when she was being sympathetic. In 2002, she told a

Canadian filmmaker that, in my eyes, both Adolf Hitler and my grandfather were false

prophets of the 20th century. Both share in common, she said, the ambition to convince other men of the one and only

truths that they had come upon. Statements like that made me wonder if Sophie Freud was an embittered

woman, driven to harsh judgments by some unspoken breach in the family. So I set out to learn more about her.

And yes, there was family conflict, not just with her grandfather, but with her mother, her father,

and her brother, who once chastised Sophie for her criticisms of psychoanalysis by telling her,

quote,

Without grandfather, the Nazis would have made lampshades out of your skin.

Sophie details at all in her 2007 book, in the Shadow of the Freud family,

which we'll quote from in this episode,

but she was not a bitter woman. She was passionate about life, love, and learning. She challenged her grandfather's view of women as passive, conservative,

incapable of following their own passions, or changing the world in the way that men do.

...