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On December 5, 1942, readers of The New Yorker magazine's “The Talk of the Town” pages were informed that “Sigmund Freud's granddaughter, a pretty girl of eighteen named Sophie, has just arrived in New York” (Robinson and Maloney 1942, 14). Sophie came to the United States along with her mother, Ernestine (Esti) Freud, the wife of Freud's second child and oldest son, Martin. In her adopted country, Sophie achieved academic success at Radcliffe College of Harvard University and the Simmons School of Social Work, ultimately earning a Ph.D. from the Florence Heller School of Social Welfare (Brandeis University) in 1970. She established a successful career as a practicing clinical social worker and social work educator. Now in retirement at age eighty-three, as Professor Emerita of Social Work at Simmons College, Sophie Freud has achieved international fame as a writer, lecturer, and often-interviewed critic of her grandfather's theories.
In 1988, Sophie published her first book, My Three Mothers and Other Passions (Freud 1988; see Silverstein 1990). This book, containing twenty-one chapters, was a mixture of rewritten versions of professional lectures and scholarly pieces, along with autobiographical self-confrontations and confessions. The final chapter was titled “Mother and Daughter: An Epitaph.” This chapter was based on a talk Sophie had given in November 1980, a few days after her mother Esti's death. Here, Sophie reflected on how conflicted her relationship with her mother had been and how she had left her mother to die alone in her hospital bed in New York, as Esti lost her battle with cancer:
I did not gladly hold her old hand. I could not find the words of comfort that I might have found in my heart for many others. I sat next to her bed with an icy and armored heart and waited for the day to pass to return to Boston … waited until I could flee in terror lest her spirit invade me and defeat my lifelong struggle to be separate and different. (328)