Freudian split Simmons professor Sophie Freud, granddaughter of Sigmund, has her own theories, and they don't involve psychoanalysis By Bella English, Globe Staff, 1/3/2002 Only minutes into the the graduate course in social work at Simmons College, the professor has begun to trash transference and psychoanalysis, major elements of the work of Sigmund Freud. Nothing particularly new there, except the professor is Sophie Freud, granddaughter of. Referring to a case study the class has just read, she says: ''That's a very Freudian interpretation.'' It isn't exactly meant as a compliment. Freud, Professor Emeritus of Social Work adds: ''I don't know if I buy it. I have some questions about this Oedipal relationship.'' On her desk, she has propped several books on the Holocaust, and Freud is giving her attentive graduate students a capsule review of each. Then she hands out student evaluations. ''You can say bad things anonymously,'' she warns, ''but I know your writing styles by now.'' Her eyes twinkle, the students laugh. They write down most everything she utters. On the subject of transference, Sophie says: ''Women are forever falling in love with their male therapists ... regardless of whether there is abuse or not. Freud sanitized it by calling it `transference.' He said it doesn't matter, women get over it afterward. But I disagree. Women then go to another therapist to get over that one.'' On Freud's theory of penis envy: ''Oh, it's such nonsense. It's like a 3 -year-old boy.'' On Freud's legacy: ''I'm not really saying he didn't have good ideas. ... I don't have to defend him. There are enough people who defend him. There are also many who dispute him.'' She may be a Freud, but Sophie Freud is not Freudian. ''I'm very skeptical about much of psychoanalysis,'' says the 77-year-old professor, who is about the same age her famous grandfather was when he granted the young Sophie audiences in his legendary study in Vienna. ''I think it's such a narcissistic indulgence that I cannot believe in it.'' (And, no, Freud's granddaughter has never been psychoanalyzed. ''I'm still patting myself on the shoulder for that,'' she chuckles). Sundays with Sigmund As a child in Vienna, she would dutifully visit her grandfather every Sunday. He wouldn't bounce her on his knee, or give her candy, or schmooze. Mostly, he sat there quietly. ''He didn't waste words. He'd contracted mouth cancer and lived in pain,'' she recalls. ''He was not a warm and fuzzy grandfather. It wasn't in the culture.'' But one thing Sophie did get from Sigmund was his economy of time. He ran his life by the clock, and she does, too. Not a second may be wasted, something she feels more strongly as the years tick by. ''I'm very particular about time. My students always know to come to class ahead of time. I try not to waste any time.'' In fact, she keeps a large old-fashioned alarm clock at the front of the classroom to remind students not to waste time. Just as her grandfather would work on many projects at once, so does she. These days, it's called multitasking. She listens to books-on-tape as she does her two circuits around Walden Pond several times a week. (In the summer, she also swims across.) She was so tired of wasting time finding parking at Simmons' Fenway campus that she bought herself a small red motorcycle and rode it to class for years, until bequeathing it to a student just weeks ago. ''I gave it up with a heavy heart,'' Sophie says. ''But, at my age, what used to be a small accident would take a long time to heal. My health and independence are more important than my motorcycle.''  Then she brightens. ''I replaced it with a Volkswagen bug. It was the closest I could get to a cycle.'' Besides teaching her doctorate-level course at Simmons, Freud is the book review editor of the American Journal of Psychotherapy, and recently wrote a review of a biography of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. Her own 1988 book, ''My Three Mothers and Other Passions,'' details the complicated relationships she had with her mother, her maternal aunt, and her famous Aunt Anna, Sigmund Freud's youngest daughter and chosen successor. Escape from the Nazis In fact, Sophie Freud and her mother, Esti, became estranged from the close-knit Freud clan in 1938, when mother took daughter to France after Germany annexed Austria under Nazi rule. Sophie's father, Martin Freud, left for England with other members of his family. ''We were lucky to be able to leave, due to my famous grandfather,'' she says, in an accent that still hints of schnitzel and strudel, despite leaving the country of her birth as a teenager. In the summer of 1940, as the Germans took Paris, mother and daughter - who had no car - rode bicycles across France, heading for an unoccupied zone in Nice. ''The Nazis were right behind them, but they rode too fast for them and got away,'' writes Sophie's daughter, Andrea Freud Loewenstein, in her book, ''The Worry Girl.'' (''I don't come out too badly in it,'' says Sophie. ''Her father comes out worse.'') Of her escape from the Nazis, Freud will only say, ''It was a strange adventure.'' In December 1941, she and her mother fled to Casablanca, then left for New York a year later. At 18, Sophie enrolled in Radcliffe, where she majored in psychology. She earned her master's degree in social work at Simmons, and her Ph.D. in social welfare at Brandeis University. At 21, she married a German immigrant, Paul Loewenstein, who had escaped from a Nazi concentration camp in France. The marriage produced three children and lasted 40 years until, in 1986, Sophie asked for a divorce. She had gone abroad on sabbatical, and ''didn't miss being married.'' Today, she says of her ex-husband (who died in 1992), ''He was a good enough man, a good enough father.'' But the ghosts of the women in her life haunted her: ''Of all three mothers I had, no one grew old with their husbands.'' Not one of them, she wrote, ''could teach me how to be a loving wife or a wise mother. No wonder I never excelled in those skills.'' Sophie still lives in the Lincoln home where she and her husband brought up their two daughters and one son. Her favorite perch is in the sunny day-room, overlooking woods, with a pond now visible through the spidery branches of mid-winter. Chickadees abound at her bird feeder, as does a pesky squirrel she calls ''my worst enemy.'' Bookshelves are crammed with tomes written by various Freuds: her grandfather, her aunt, herself, her daughter. There's a large, framed print of Sigmund Freud with ''Id,'' ''Ego, '' and ''Oedipus'' written on it, plus a stern-looking bust of her grandfather on the shelf. ''He was the glowering man with a beard, in the picture in the living room,'' writes Andrea, the oldest of the Loewenstein children. ''When my mother wanted to promise something, she would say, `I swear it on the beard of my grandfather.''' Loewenstein credits her mother with her love of literature. ''I had a slight learning disability, and she was really the one who taught me to read and write. Without her support, I never would have done well in school, let alone have a Ph.D. in English and teach in college,'' says Loewenstein, a writer who lives in Brooklyn and teaches English at Medgar Evers College. Loewenstein adds: ''She's really a good role model for aging for me.'' Aging, schmaging Besides walking and swimming, Sophie goes to exercise class twice a week (''I really dread it''), plays killer ping-pong every Monday night at the Lincoln Recreation Center, and travels abroad by herself.  Christmas D ay, she left for Berlin and Vienna to see friends. In April, she'll go to Sweden, and again to Vienna next summer to present a paper. Back home, there's the Simmons class she teaches, the Cambridge counseling center where she volunteers, and the cases she reviews - gratis - for the state Department of Social Services. Freud credits herself with introducing feminism into the field of social work, and she rails against the plight of poor people, particularly single mothers. ''We were brought up with fairly strong values to help others and serve others,'' says Dania Jekel, the second of Sophie's children. ''Making money was not the thing to do.'' Jekel, who lives in Newton, runs the Asperger's Association of New England, a group that supports children and adults with Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism. Sophie's youngest child, George, is a social scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Sophie has taught as long as she can remember, though part-time while the kids were school-aged. Her Simmons class takes up much of her time; she prepares detailed outlines each week for the students. She has thought of giving up the class, but she loves her students, and they love her. ''Her class stretched my mind in a way that got me to think out of the box about human behavior and relationships, like a personal `aha!''' says Emily Ostrower, now principal of the Graham and Parks School in Cambridge. ''Sophie is a bit eccentric in the most charming sort of way. I picture her, rain or shine, riding that scooter with lovely billows of purple or pink from her scarves. She was fascinating to listen to; I loved going to her class.'' One of Sophie's most complex relationships in her life was with her Aunt Anna, Sigmund's youngest child and heir apparent. As long as her mother was alive, Sophie was reluctant to approach Anna; the two in-laws had never gotten along. Years earlier, when Sophie and Anna Freud both lived for a year in Cambridge, they never met. Family matters But, later, the pull of blood was strong. ''I needed Tante Anna's blessing before I could rightfully reclaim the family legacy that I had betrayed, and yet remained faithful to, in its core. I needed her blessing to forgive my father, her brother, who had abandoned me in adolescence. I needed her blessing to make sure that I was worthy of being loved by a queen,'' Sophie wrote in her memoir. In 1979-80, she took a sabbatical from Simmons and spent the year in England, partly to woo her elderly aunt. Anna had inherited the Freud family's frugal streak - as has her niece. But Sophie splurged, and brought her fresh fruits out of season and other delicacies. The two sat and knitted together. As Anna's health deteriorated, Sophie would read to her. ''She was not that easy to conquer,'' says Sophie. ''I loved her but I don't think she loved me. She liked me, she appreciated me. But that was OK. I'd rather love than be loved.'' She believes that some of her best writings have been on her Aunt Anna, analyzing her work and life. There are more writing projects Sophie wants to tackle, including a book about her difficult mother. Then there's the murder mystery that's kicking around in her head. ''It would be about the three housekeepers in the Freud household,'' she says. ''Housekeepers were very important in that family.'' One of them, she says, will be the murder victim. The perpetrator, she stresses, is definitely not a Freud. Does he/she get caught? ''I think not,'' says Freud, granddaughter of. How's this for a title, then: ''A Freudian Slip.'' This story ran on page D1 of the Boston Globe on 1/3/2002. c