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For anyone who has engaged with the history of psychoanalysis in the 20th century, The Interwoven Lives of Sigmund, Anna, and W. Ernest Freud holds a great fascination. Upon first hearing the title, I felt skeptical. Here we have Sigmund Freud, the founder and dominating titan of psychoanalysis. Then Anna Freud, his daughter, one of foremost leaders of the psychoanalytic movement in midcentury and an influential writer. And finally: who? W. Ernest Freud? I had never of him. And indeed he was not a major player in the history of psychoanalysis. He was Freud's eldest grandchild, the son of his daughter, Sophie Freud Halberstadt, and her husband, Max Halberstadt. (Ernest, as I will call him, began life as Ernst Wolfgang Halberstadt. While living in England he anglicized his name from Ernst to Ernest, and, with Anna Freud's encouragement, adopted Freud as his last name.) He became a psychoanalyst, the only of Freud's grandchildren to do so, and made some modest contributions, principally related to infant observation.
But the lives of these three people were indeed interwoven. Daniel Benveniste, by looking at their lives with an emphasis on the interactions of each with the other two, does much to illuminate our understanding of Sigmund Freud and Anna Freud.
Ernest was the Zelig of psychoanalysis; incredibly he was there at so many key moments. Freud's first becoming a grandparent was due to Ernest's birth. And Freud was far more involved with him than with any of his other grandchildren. Freud had two personal losses that affected him profoundly. The first was the death of his daughter Sophie (Ernest's mother), whom Freud described as his favorite daughter (p. 164). The second was the death of Sophie's son, Heinerle (Ernest's younger brother). After the latter death, Freud told Sandor Ferenczi that he suffered the first depression of his life, and he confided to Ernest Jones that, in Jones's words, this loss “killed something in him for good” (p. 61).
Freud, who, though t