You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Sigmund Freud had three families: the one into which he was born, his own nuclear family, and that which he fathered as the founder of psychoanalysis and the psychoanalytic movement. Professor Roazen, a social historian who is himself unanalysed, was launched on a quest to learn about the founder of psychoanalysis by an interview with Helene Deutsch in the 1960s. He approached the subject by talking to psychoanalysts and members of Freud's family, and this book is the outcome.
Freud's first family is given little space. His father, Leopold, seems to have produced his greatest effect on Sigmund by the act of dying, while his mother, who was considerably younger than his father, idealized her ‘golden boy’. She was a strongwilled woman, described by her granddaughter Anna as ‘rather infantile’ - which may say as much about their relationship as about the lady herself. In his mother's old age Freud visited her every week, but when she died at 93 he didn't attend her funeral.
His second, nuclear, family was unusual insofar as women were always predominant. The primary carers were his wife, Martha, and her sister, Minna. It was they who saw to the children's needs, and judging from Freud's timetable (mealtimes apart) had near-exclusive contact with the children ‘till they were out of nappies’. Minna was Freud's card-playing partner, although Roazen suggests that there was no sexual relationship between them, that Freud had ‘a rare capacity to sublimate and was relatively impotent’! It is interesting to note that the formulator of the triangular Oedipus Complex had a very different family constellation himself, in which exclusion from the nursery may have forged a pattern of non-intervention in his children's lives later on. In this respect his behaviour towards his colleagues and students was very different.
Freud's youngest daughter, Anna, straddled both his nuclear and psychoanalytic families. It was she who developed psychoanalysis with children (her father never worked d