Sophie Freud, granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, discussed her new book, Living in the Shadow of the Freud Family, and signed copies last Thursday before a packed Shapiro Campus Center Multipurpose Room. The book, she said, is a compilation of her family's memoirs and a biography of her mother, Esti Drucker Freud. A recipient of the National Association of Social Workers Lifetime Achievement Award, Sophie Freud said the reason she is publishing a book at the age of 84 is to try to "postpone death."

Dr. Sharon Sokoloff, director of Brandeis' Osher Lifelong Learning Institute where Freud currently teaches the literature course "Personal Tales of Madness and Sadness," introduced Freud as a member of BOLLI's elected advisory council and leader of BOLLI's green movement, calling her a "straight-shooting, compassionate, intellectually vibrant woman."

"Some of you may have come because of the Freud name, so I will take you back 100 years to the beginning of World War I, when my father enlisted in WWI," Freud began her speech.

She discussed her parents' early relationship and read excerpts from love letters written by her mother to her father while he was a prisoner of war in Italy during WWI. "I can never throw away anything, so I had to write this book and put the letters in this book so they won't get lost," she joked.

One of the pieces she read was a letter in which her mother accepted her father's marriage proposal. "I read this to you to show you how much sexual morals have changed and to give you an example of love letters at that time," she said.

"[These letters] were the highlight of my parents' marriage," she said. "It all went downhill after that."

Freud spent the majority of her lecture discussing the rise of Nazi Germany and her family's flight from Vienna, which eventually brought her and her mother to the United States. "History takes on a new reality when it is told by the characters that lived through it," she said.

During the war, due to her parents' faltering marriage, Freud and her mother were sent to Paris while her father, brother and grandparents went to London.

In a letter that Freud found many years later, her grandfather wrote that he hoped this split would be the end of his son's unhappy marriage, writing that "[Esti's] not only miserably mishuga [crazy] but mad in the medical sense."

When the Nazis invaded France, the Freud family managed to escape to Nice in what was called the free zone, traveling the entire distance on bicycles, and from there they gained passage to the United States.

Freud went into detail discussing her aunts and neighbors who were not as lucky and whom the Nazis killed. She reminded the audience that the Nazis killed people in two stages, first sending them to the ghettos and then to the death camps.

Her father was unable to send the rest of the family money upon their arrival in America while he stayed in London, so Freud's cousin Edward Bernays, who is known as the "Father of Public Relations," paid for her Harvard education.

Freud went on to earn a degree from Brandeis' Heller School for Social Policy and Management, where she was finally able to step out from under her grandfather's shadow. "When I got accepted from the Heller School, which is exactly six miles from my house, I bought a motor scooter, and instead of them talking about me as the granddaughter of Freud, they started calling me 'that woman who rides the motor scooter,'" she said.

Her son is also a Brandeis graduate and is now a "big-time professor" at Carnegie Mellon University.

During the question-and-answer session following the speech, a student asked Freud what became of her parents' marriage. They never sought counseling, she said, because her grandfather did not believe in marriage counseling. However, her mother never gave her father a divorce.

"[Freud's] story was inspirational," said Rachel Koffer '11. "It was really inspirational to get to hear her life lessons, especially with her struggles."

Freud added that she does not support her grandfather's theories and that she underwent a conversion while reading Erving Goffman's Stigma at the Heller School. "Life is not about sex and aggression, but about self respect," she said.