My Three Mothers and Other Passions
eBook - ePub

My Three Mothers and Other Passions

Sophie Freud

Share book
  1. 372 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

My Three Mothers and Other Passions

Sophie Freud

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

Sophie Freud— author, teacher, social worker, mother, daughter, and grand-daughter of Sigmund Freud—here offers, for the first time, a candid portrait of her struggles in her own life. Blessed and cursed with the legacy of a famous family, Dr. Freud has negotiated her way from a blissful childhood in Vienna, to Paris, to Radcliff College, to her present-day life as on one of the most respected teachers in her field. My Three Mothers and Other Passions is a remarkable story about a remarkable woman, and Dr. Freud explores with us openly and engagingly the many experiences of her life.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is My Three Mothers and Other Passions an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access My Three Mothers and Other Passions by Sophie Freud in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Psicologia & Storia e teoria della psicologia. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
NYU Press
Year
1991
ISBN
9780814728932

1 / My Three Mothers

IT is not true that I had only three mothers. I have spent much of my life recruiting mothers, seeking and craving the advice, protection, support, and comfort of older, wiser women. One part of my self-image is that of a triumphant queen, the direct descendant of three powerful, talented women, and a prized adopted daughter of other distinguished women. The other part of my divided self is that of an orphan child, roaming the streets in search of a mother who might approve of me and want to get to know me. Orphans, I imagine, are people who have to earn love through hard work, rather than receive it unconditionally. Orphans, I also imagine, are people who continue to need mothers to take care of them, because they missed out on some care taking when they needed it most. It is in these ways that I sometimes feel myself to be an orphan.
I did have three mothers who were of my own kin, who thought of me, at least for a time, as their own daughter, who each in her own way taught me what is important in life, and who each left me a legacy. They were the mother of my childhood, the mother of my early adolescence, and the mother of my late midlife. I would like to understand more deeply how my three mothers shaped my life. I especially want to explore the mutual care taking that went on between each of my three mothers and myself, because I think it lies at the root of my own ability and failure to nurture my own daughters and to be a “good enough” mother to the young women who in turn recruit me for their own needs.
I think of my first mother as the mother of my childhood. She was my biological mother, and our relationship continued throughout her life, but it became static in my adolescence, undifferentiated and distant until her recent death at the age of eighty-six. Later in life, it became quite difficult for me to recapture how deeply attached I must have been to my first mother, but I have numerous childhood photographs in which I melt into her body, while she, always beautifully dressed, stares into the camera. I continue to feel anguish, puzzlement, and guilt about my frozen feelings toward this first mother who seems to have loved me so much. This relationship has set the stage for my constant yearning to be intensely loved, while I remain terrified of the costs should this ever really happen.

First Mother

My first mother grew up as the oldest of three daughters in a well-to-do middle-class Viennese Jewish family. I persuaded her to write her autobiography when she was eighty-two years old, and here are her own words about her childhood: “I did not have a happy childhood at all; most of the time I was terrified of my mother’s harsh punishments. I was convinced that my mother hated me, and I suffered very much from her unjust treatment. I was an easy and friendly little girl, but because of what I thought loveless treatment, I became a difficult and morose teenager, made even more unhappy by constant nagging and slapping, and scenes verging on the hysterical made for trifles by my mother.”
After the fateful Kristallnacht in November 1938, which escalated the terror against German and Austrian Jews, my mother’s widowed mother, initially left behind in Vienna, joined her daughters in Paris. Unlike her three daughters, who all managed to escape from France to America, my maternal grandmother was deported from France to Terezin, which is all we ever learned about her death. My first mother and I never discussed her mother’s tragic fate. Neither could I discuss the matter with my second mother, my first mother’s youngest sister, who probably never recovered from the guilt of leaving her mother behind when she and her family left France in good time. It became part of my family legacy that daughters rescue their own lives at their mother’s expense.
My first mother must have hoped as fervently as I later hoped as a young mother to give her daughter all the love that she had missed. I never experienced her as harsh, nagging, or critical, perhaps because such treatment was reserved for my less favored brother. Besides, as a working woman, she never did attend that closely to my daily activities. I was a much loved and favored child, yet, I think, largely unseen. My first mother was (or became in her disastrous marriage) an unhappy and bitter woman. She married a fairy tale prince, a son of Sigmund Freud, a handsome charming knight whose shiny armor quickly tarnished. Quarrels, tears, and violent hysterical scenes were the background music of my childhood. Later I would enter my own marriage with the tacit agreement never to fight. It is quite sad to realize that the suppression of rage and tears also tends to choke deep love and tenderness. The physical demonstration of intense emotions is inaccessible to me except through written words.
My first mother gave me a model of an ambitious, goal-oriented, and disciplined worker. I also learned from her that relationships to husband, children, and friends lead to betrayal, disappointment, and disaster, while one can count on the satisfactions derived from one’s own efforts and accomplishments.
I watched my first mother’s anxious and intense preoccupation with preserving her beauty; I secretly resolved, one evening after she had departed in a cloud of scents and adornments, never to paint my face, dye my hair, use perfume, and generally to avoid most other feminine accoutrements. I must have been about six years old.
In spite of her beauty, intelligence, and multiple talents, my first mother was torn and tormented by massive inferiority feelings that encompassed both her personal and her professional life. “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the most beautiful of all?” My first mother’s life was spent proving that she was a woman of greater beauty, status, intelligence, knowledge, and achievement than her disrespectful, slighting enemies seemed to assume.
My first mother looked to me from early childhood on for solace against the daily injuries of life. She cried in my arms, asked for company at unexpected lonely moments when I was playing with friends, rehearsed her recital pieces under my eight-year-old tutelage. Together we worried acutely whether the audience for her poetry recital would be large enough; whether enough private clients would ask for help with their speech problems; whether she would be included in some important occasion; whether someone of importance would accept an invitation to her party; whether my father would remember to send her red roses for their wedding anniversary. Why did my first mother want red roses from a man who regularly read the newspaper during the one daily meal that he shared with her? After Austria was occupied by the Germans, I remember one early dawn watching my mother and father leave the house together. This image has stayed with me for forty-six years, because their going out together was the most unusual happening in those days of strange happenings. I think they were summoned by the Gestapo to be interrogated.
Was it perhaps my first mother’s immense needfulness and my despair about my inability to comfort her that eventually moved me to close my heart to her suffering? Later I would have a daughter who needed to share the unhappiness of a child’s daily life with me. I could not bear it; I transformed my pain into anger against her.
After the Anschluss my brother, my father, and his whole family went to London, while my mother and I moved to Paris, where her youngest sister and her family had come from Berlin a few years earlier. I lost overnight a father, albeit an emotionally distant one, an older brother, friends, relatives, my governess, my home, my school, favorite and hated teachers, and a familiar language. This drastic occurrence has become a commonplace twentieth century event for millions of people around the world.

Second Mother

It was at this frightening moment in my life, when I had decided not to become engulfed in my first mother’s desperation but to abandon her to her fate, that I found in my maternal aunt my second mother of early adolescence.
My mother’s self-doubts sparked a tormenting jealousy. “Who is your favorite grandmother?” she would ask my children, perhaps with sinking heart. Although she matched her youngest sister in beauty and talent and surpassed her in worldly success, she was consumed with envy toward this charming charismatic sister who collected hearts without seeming effort.
My second mother had been, I think, quite intimate with my father, and now she would steal my affection as well. My first mother must have suffered a great deal, but she did not interfere in the relationship. Perhaps she was ready to submit to a fate that had destined her sister to be universally loved, while she was meant to live in emotional isolation. Yet I have a second, more compelling explanation. My first mother was generous toward me and wished me well. I think she hoped that her sister would teach me the art of being loved.
The two sisters, one forever unloved, the other universally loved (or so it seemed), watched each other all their later lives from an unbreachable distance of five blocks in New York City. My aunt was stricken with extreme misfortune when her only son succumbed to mental illness. Although my brother did not speak to his mother for fifteen angry years, she had, after all, raised two children who were able to negotiate life. My first mother must have secretly felt some righting of the fates. My second mother, however, viewed the fates as highly capricious and unfair. “Why did your mother have such luck with her children in that miserably quarrelsome household in which you grew up, while I protected my son from such ugliness?” she would ask me. But that happened much later.
When my second mother received me with open, loving arms as the daughter she had always longed for, she was a vital, passionate woman who presided over a court full of men and women who pleaded for her love, her friendship, her patronage. I stepped from the confining Victorian environment in which I had been raised by a governess into the dazzling, colorful world that this joyous, warm-hearted woman was ready to share with me.
Perhaps it will be a special feast for Freud’s numerous historians to learn that his own granddaughter grew to be thirteen and one-half years old without the slightest idea how babies start to grow inside their mothers. My first mother’s information about sexual matters had been quite sparse, and I had apparently not been a very curious child. “Don’t scratch yourself,” she said to me when I was perhaps four years old, whenever my hand would wander below my waist. In my early teens she said to me: “Girls start to bleed at a certain age” after I had suddenly and inexplicably started to bleed and my governess had refused to discuss the matter, “and it means that they are becoming women.” “You can always fake it,” she said to me and blushed, when I was a young married woman. These were the only sexual conversations with her that I can recall.
In contrast, my second mother radiated sexuality. I would visit her on a late Saturday morning and find her having breakfast in bed, surrounded by disorder. While I threw away the empty whiskey bottles that had a mysterious way of accumulating under her bed and emptied dozens of overflowing ashtrays, she regaled me with exciting stories of love and intrigue.

Great Loves

My second mother’s marriage was at least as unhappy as my first mother’s, but in a very different way. While my first mother’s passionate attachment to her hate-filled and stingy husband survived their forty years of marital separation, my second mother had only contempt tempered by pity for her husband. He was unable to relate to people, but was devoted to his wife and apparently grateful to live in her periphery. No doubt the drama and color that filled her life helped him to forget the deadness within him. While my first mother had turned to a professional career as a source of satisfaction, my second mother found an outlet for her passionate nature in a series of great love affairs. She chose her lovers with great care; I could mention a handful of internationally distinguished men who were honored by having been intimate with her.
Although my second mother provided me with some factual sexual information, she was hardly inclined to drag me into a dishonorable life. She assured me that people who claimed that sex was enjoyable were simply lying. I will never know whether she was acting protectively or sharing her own truth with me. She also vigorously interfered with my timid sexual experimentation. Both of my mothers, sisters after all, were united in wishing to preserve my virginity, guiding me unspoiled to a suitable marriage. Cultural myths about marriage as the solution to a woman’s life problems outweighed these two women’s private experiences.
At times my second mother would also talk about disappointments. There were short stories she had written that were inevitably returned in the mail; there were tasteful collages out of seashells that could not be marketed; there were the plans for an interior decorating business that never quite took off. Yet these failures were treated with a touch of humor and shrugged off as temporary set-backs. My second mother was not dependent on her earnings and did not share my first mother’s starvation fantasies. She had a husband who was adept at earning a great deal of money, which she spent as fast as he could earn it.
Do all mothers prefer to use their daughters rather than their sons as confidantes, in the manner of my first and second mothers? My second mother once had a growth in her breast that needed to be removed. While she confided in me from the very beginning all the anxieties surrounding this fearful event, her son of the same age was never informed of the operation until its benign outcome. Are sons so fragile that they need to be protected from their mothers’ emotional and physical vulnerabilities? It could also be true that sons do not make understanding or sympathetic listeners.
The role of confidante has thus become part of my identity, imprinted in childhood and adolescence. Whenever someone comes to the house to repair the refrigerator, or when I go for job interviews, or even in the course of a mere business telephone call, I become the recipient of some significant information about that person’s life. As you can see, I am ready in turn to share of myself. Actually I am always hoping that other people might ask me good questions and wait long enough for the answer.
My second mother, just like my first, also wished me a better life than she was leading herself. When I started to smoke she raised such a ruction, imploring me not to follow her nicotine-addicted path, that I desisted smoking forever.
While I was too symbiotically fused with my first mother to experience love for her, my second mother, who had other close relationships as well, left me enough room to breathe. I think it was my deep feelings for my second mother that laid the seeds for my occasional capacity to love deeply and passionately.
Yet again, I would betray this second mother who had appeared in my life at a moment of extreme need and who had nurtured me with such generosity. Or perhaps we betrayed each other; it is hard to be certain.
After our separate war odysseys, the families reassembled in New York City with children grown into young adulthood. My second mother’s son began to court me and I explained to him that I thought of him as a brother, not a lover. Within a few years my second mother’s life became absorbed in his illness. She came to visit my young family in Boston and called her son as soon as she arrived, then left after a few hours. “He loved you” she said. “His doctors have told me that your rejection precipitated his illness. I wanted you to marry him; you are a strong woman and could have sustained him.” There was a visit in which my second mother watched my oldest daughter, my Sorgenkind—the child I had chosen to overlove and worry about, and said, “This child’s labile moods are just like your cousin’s when he was her age. They seem to have quite similar personalities.” After that I never again asked my second mother, whom I had once loved with such great passion, to visit us. I did not see her again before she choked to death, dying of emphysema ten years before my first mother, who was eight years older than she. My second mother did not remember me in her will, yet she left me executor of her son’s estate, knowing that she could count on me, her only daughter.

Third Mother

I had failed my first mother in crucial ways and forfeited my second mother, believing that I could hold on to my own life only by forsaking them. But since the gods have favored me in extraordinarily outrageous ways, I found a third chance to redeem myself. I found a third mother who allowed me to help her die, harmoniously, without guilt or betrayal. At the age of fifty-five I journeyed to London for a year, apparently to recruit this third mother for my middle life. She was my grandfather’s youngest child, my father’s youngest sister, my famous aunt, Anna Freud.
My first mother would never learn of my great love for my paternal aunt, and indeed, that love would bear fruition only after her death. While my first mother had been defeated in her rivalry with her younger sister for the love and admiration of men, she was even more jealous of her sister-in-law’s immense worldly recognition, which would have meant so much to her.
My love for my aunt might have seemed an act of treason to her. It is, however, more likely that my mother wanted me to repair the rift created forty years earlier between us and the Freud family. Why else would she have told me so often through the years, frequently in anger and sometimes in admiration, that I looked and acted like a typical Freud?
As a last act of generosity my first mother waited to die until I had returned from my sabbatical. I was too frozen to thank her fully for always having wished me well, but I was able to bid her good-bye, and she did not seem to hold grudges against me. Until her death, she nurtured me the best she could.
The image of my third mother had accompanied me all through life. I worked in a field related to hers, and I regularly read her books and articles and went to lectures that she sometimes gave in the Boston area. We exchanged yearly holiday greetings, but I felt too timid and unworthy to approach her more closely even when we lived temporarily in the same town. My aunt in turn treated me coldly, like a stranger or worse, on our occasional encounters.
As I had listened to her lecturing, simple and modest in her demeanor yet speaking with great force and clarity and without notes, she had evoked my intense admiration. Simply dressed and mostly unadorned, she always struck me into her old age and even after her stroke as the most beautiful woman I had ever met. I wanted to become such a woman. When I was a young woman her words were gospel to me; later I lost my faith in that religion, but I remained tactful and cautious about expressing different opinions. It is perhaps fortunate that we met at a point when theories hardly mattered any longer.
I do not know what mysterious forces suddenly compelled me at such a late age to seek out this stern and distant aunt and ask her blessing before she died. Was I merely carrying out my mother’s mission? Was it perhaps my last chance to repair the broken relationship with my long-dead father? Or did I want to make up for the hurt of having been excluded from my grandfather’s last year and death? My mother had bequeathed me her self-doubts as well as a determination to defeat them. Perhaps I needed this third and deeply admired mother’s love as a victory over my self-doubts.
My campaign to win my eighty-two-year-old aunt’s well-guarded heart could never have been deliberately designed. The relationship developed like a sequence of movie shots, in which I played my assigned part from day to day without clear knowledge of the plot or the outcome. Only in retrospect am I able to admire my skillful strategies, my tenacity, the infinite guile and bribery that I deployed during that year. Some of my friends have said that it should not be so hard to win someone’s love. Yet athletes train for years to win an Olympic medal and do not feel that they worked too hard for the prize.
Our first meeting was in Grandfather’s large calcified office-museum. We both sat in semisilence and shivered with cold. “I am tired” she said. “I am sorry to disturb you,” I answered. However, that winter her life companion died, and I found it possible to move into that empty space in her life. Occasional visits, which I always had to initiate, slowly turned into daily ever-longer evenings in which I sat next to her bedside and listened to her reminiscences of the war years. Sometimes we would simply sit together in silence and attend to our individual knitting. “Look, I finished this baby sweater,” I said. She examined the...

Table of contents