Somehow a copy of The Week: The Best of the U.S. and International Media from June 17, 2022, wound up in our bathroom. In it, there was an obituary of Sophie Freud, granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, and long-time professor of social work at Simmons University in Boston, who died on June 2, 2022, in Lincoln, Mass.
Apparently, Sophie called psychoanalysis a “narcissistic indulgence.” She compared Sigmund Freud to Adolph Hitler, saying both were “false prophets of the twentieth century.” Apparently, she also slammed so-called transference and counter-transference between male psychotherapists and female patients — with good reason, I think, as it seems a little too close to sexual misconduct.
She sounds like someone I want to know more about. With luck, a good biography will come out in the not too distant future.
Update, 4/30: The Lincoln Squirrel, the independent newspaper in Lincoln, Mass., provided a link to an excellent profile of Sophie Freud published back in 2007. And there was an obit in the NY Times. In 2007, Sophie Freud published her feminist memoir, Living in the Shadow of the Freud Family.