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.
Living in the Shadow of the Freud Family is fascinating for many reasons, not the least of which is that it is “written and edited” by Sophie Freud, Sigmund Freud's distinguished granddaughter, Professor Emerita of Social Work at Simmons College. She has written about her mother in an earlier book, My Three Mothers and Other Passions (Freud, 1988), but in her new work she annotates and expands her mother's autobiography, Vignettes of My Life, by including other voices and letters, such as her brother's memoir, her children's comments about their grandmother, and her own diary entries. She also narrates her own story about her life immediately before, during, and after World War II. “With my 81 years,” she notes at the beginning, “I am already two years older than my mother was when she wrote her autobiography at the age of 79. She did so at my urging. She found it to be an exciting and absorbing task” (p. xv). So, too, was it an exciting and absorbing task for Sophie Freud to write her own book—and I believe readers will be excited and absorbed as they journey through this unusual work.
Ernestine (“Esti”) Drucker, the daughter of rich and influential Viennese-Jewish parents, first met Martin Freud, the psychoanalyst's oldest son, during the Great War. She was immediately attracted to the dashing artillery officer, but his family was suspicious of her. “It is possible,” Sophie Freud observes, “that grandfather recognized at a glance that my mother, who was probably beautifully dressed, came from a wealthy family and would be a threat to the thrifty lifestyle practiced by the women in the Freud family” (p. 42). Esti began a long, passionate, and one-sided correspondence with Martin when he was a prisoner-of-war in 1918. “My main attraction is to love you (p. 54),” she confesses to him in a March 1919 letter. Four months later, she writes another letter revealing her deep insecurity, of which she seemed to be largely unaware. After claiming that she has “invincible self