When Sigmund Freud lost his daughter Sophie.

 

When Sigmund Freud lost his daughter Sophie.

When Sigmund Freud lost his daughter Sophie, he wrote a letter to his friend and colleague Ludwig Binswanger. In it, he explained that grief is, in a sense, a way of holding on to love and that it is thus better not to break free from it altogether.

When Sigmund Freud lost his daughter Sophie, he was forced to revise many of his theories about grief. He was fully aware that this pain and emptiness would never leave him. It may get weaker over time but will not stop completely. At the same time, he understood that there was no sanctuary where he could alleviate the suffering. The death of a child was, in his opinion, something unthinkable.

Sophie Freud was the fifth child of Sigmund Freud and Sophie Halberstadt. Born on April 12, 1893, she became her father's favorite almost immediately. This child softened the tyrannical and patriarchal character of the father of psychoanalysis. She was beautiful, determined and always determined to follow her own will regardless of what her surroundings dictated.

She married Max Halberstadt, a photographer and portrait painter from Hamburg, at the age of 20. The 30-year-old was not rich, nor was he prominent or particularly ambitious. Thus, Sigmund Freud was aware that his daughter might be in distress. But he did not object to the marriage and made his daughter promise to keep him informed of her problems and concerns.

That's what Sophie did. But no one could predict that her happiness (and her family's) would disappear and that she would die just six years into her marriage.

When Sigmund Freud lost his daughter Sophie

A year into their marriage, Sophie and Max Halberstadt had a child, Ernst Wolfgang. Sigmund Freud was fascinated by the little boy and wrote these words to his colleague Karl Abraham:

“My grandson Ernst is a charming little guy who laughs charmingly when you pay attention to him. He is a decent and valuable creature in these times where only loose bestiality thrives.”

The context of these comments was World War I which was raging in Europe at the time. Sigmund Freud was one of the first public figures to warn of the confusing and brutal movement that was growing even in his hometown of Vienna. But his personal life and family circle would not be affected until Hitler came to power in 1933.

Until then, Freud continued to develop his work while maintaining correspondence with his daughter Sophie. On December 8, 1918, his second grandson, Heinz, was born. It was then that the young woman told her father that they were in financial trouble and that the arrival of the second son was a blessing but also a problem.

Freud did not hesitate to offer her the help she needed. As we can read in the Letters of Sigmund Freud, he also offered his daughter advice about the contraceptives of the time. But they did not seem to be effective because a year later Sophie became pregnant again.

The third unwanted pregnancy

When Sophie wrote to her father announcing this third unwanted pregnancy and dreading his response, her father responded like this:

If you think the news will make me very angry or dismayed, you are wrong. Accept this child, do not be disappointed. In a few days you will receive some money which has come from my last work.”

But in 1920, Europe was in the grip of the Spanish Flu. Sophie was very weakened by the third pregnancy and ended up being admitted to a hospital in January of that year. She unfortunately died a few days later from an infection. When Sigmund Freud lost his daughter Sophie, he wrote about the effects of this experience.

He emphasized, among other things, that he could not arrange transport to be with her during her last days. The only thing he could do was go to her funeral and try to accept a loss for which he found no meaning or explanation.

The most remarkable thing, however, occurred nine years after the loss. In a letter to one of her best friends and colleagues, Ludwig Binswanger, he wrote that he still had not come to terms with the experience.

“We know that the acute pain we feel after a loss will continue; it will also remain inconsolable and we will never find a replacement. No matter what happens, no matter what we do, the pain is always there. And that's how it should be. It is the only way to preserve a love that we do not want to give up.”

-Letter from Sigmund Freud to Ludwig Binswanger-

Sigmund Freud and his grief

In Letters of Sigmund Freud, we can even read the letters that Freud and Dr. Arthur Lippmann of the Hamburg hospital sent to each other after Sophie's death at the age of 26.

In them, the father of psychoanalysis lamented that effective contraceptives were not yet available. Moreover, in these letters he even lamented what he called "A foolish and inhumane law which forced women to continue with unwanted pregnancies".

When Sigmund Freud lost his daughter Sophie, he tried to deal with the grief in his own way. He dragged it out for more than 10 years, to the point where he had to reformulate the entire concept in his theories.

Eventually he had to accept that both sadness and melancholy could be experienced when dealing with loss and that both states were acceptable. Even the pain itself was a challenge compatible with survival. It was (and is) a strong bond that we refuse to abandon because it is our way of holding on to the love of a loved one.

the love for the one you like is very strong and you feel it deep in your heart.

Samuel

samuel.ku35@gmail.com

for more information visit my blog #psychologi-analyses where there is a lot of internal information.