The Guardian from London, Greater London, England • 34

Women Qs'fl Sophie Freud 'All dogmatists still make me shudder' chris spencer Why Sigmund Freud's granddaughter is the black sheep of the family Sophie's choice not to have children by expounding at length on her devotion to travel, art and culture. What women found almost impossible to say, even in the heady days of the early 1970s, was that they simply did not want children. Mother love retains iconic status in western culture, finding its consummate expression in countless pictures of patient, suffering madonnas, even though that image is a hangover from previous centuries when childbirth was a far more risky undertaking. The fate of Mary Wollstonecraft, who died in 1797 from blood poisoning, 12 days after the birth of her second daughter, is paradigmatic of the danger confronted by every pregnant woman until this century (and still faced by women in countries with less advanced medical care). Even if women did not die in childbirth, they faced the prospect of being worn out, like Queen Anne, by multiple pregnancies.

The poignant portraits of aristocratic women by Renaissance masters in 15th-century Italy frequently record lives cut short, following a familiar pattern of arranged marriage, numerous pregnancies in quick succession and then premature death. Battista Sforza sat for Hero della Francesca in 1465, along with her husband, Count Federigo da Montefeltro; seven years later, in 1472, she was dead. She had just given birth to her first son and fifth child. The adulation of motherhood, especially as encouraged by the Christian church, can be seen as a quid pro quo for undertaking so dangerous an activity; even now, in Italy, the Roman Catholic Church is considering the beatification of a woman who died 20 years ago after refusing cancer treatment which would endanger her unborn child. Until very recently, the only practical escape route for women who wished to avoid repeated pregnancy was the cloister; significantly, they were required to undertake in return an alternative form of altruistic surrender, giving up both the world and sexual pleasure.

(St Catherine of Siena, according to historians, "received visions which led her to vow her virginity to Jesus Christ" and in doing so she escaped her mother's exhausting fate of producing more than 20 children.) Thus childbirth came to be seen not only.as natural but as the defining act of female identity; a woman who was not willing to undertake it had to prove herself through another, very public act of self-denial. A woman who chooses not to have children, yet enjoys sexual relations with men, fails in both tests. She is viewed as self-regarding and immature, while motherhood continues to bathe its practitioners in a beatific glow. While mothers are still admired in this way, it is virtually impossible to mount a serious critique of the new and baffling obsession with infertility; if becoming pregnant is the ultimate selfless act, is it not selftsA to question the length to which couples are willing to go in order to have a child? How far we have gone along this road is demonstrated by Professor Lilford's obscene suggestion that cancer patients and people crippled with arthritis should queue for treatment behind the infertile. Yet, with recent developments in medicine, the situation has reversed itself.

A generation of women have grown up believing they can have it all marriage, a career and a baby while hiding behind the sentimental image of mothers as self-sacrificing madonnas. Childless but sexually active women, meanwhile, continue to carry the stigma of having refused to undertake the defining act of female sacrifice. They are seen as pleasure-seeking, selfish and irresponsible the characteristics, according to centuries of received wisdom, of that other female archetype, the whore. Ujff BWiiiiiwi i I'M xSa me but I think he must have been a very irascible character, the way he persecuted all dissenters and refused to accept any criticism." According to Sophie, her Aunt Anna, Freud's favourite child and heir to his psychoanalytical empire, never felt able to criticise a word he said, even decades after his death, and treated even his most absurd utterances as scientific truths. Given Freud's belief in the incestuous nature of family ties, it seems appropriate that Sophie, author of the autobiographical My Three Mothers, remains intellectually and emotionally dominated by family concerns.

This book contains a start-lingly honest account of her passionate relationship with her Aunt Anna, with whom she became close in 1980, just two years before she died. Anna told her niece: "It is really quite inconvenient for you to be in love with so old an aunt." Sophie's book also describes in painful detail her relationship with her critical and dependent mother, who was dismissed by Freud, her father-in-law, as Sophie believes her mother was scarred by the struggle to survive both Nazism and the crushing contemporary intolerance of ambitious women. When Sophie gave a lecture about her mother to an American Jewish women's group, many shed tears of recognition, recalling their own passionate yet claustrophobic relationships with their mothers. Her maternal grandmother did not survive Hitler and Sophie believes her mother's life was blighted by a sense of guilt at not having rescued her. "What I like best about America," Sophie says, "is that I could come here and not stay in Europe to be killed.

It is strange how these things keep coming back to you. I have been going through another 'Holocaust winter', reading books about Auschwitz. Somehow, the knowledge that so many of my relatives died this way still obsesses me from time to time." Sophie has not maintained contact with every branch of her dynasty and is surprised to learn that Lucien Freud is so revered an artist in Britain. As far as she is concerned, he and Clement are "just cousins who I don't see. We're not a very cosy family." She gives a characteristic chuckle, before admitting: "Having Freud as my grandfather certainly opened doors that would not have opened otherwise.

It's also given a spice to my life which I have enjoyed. Overall, it has been more of a benefit than a burden." Tim Robinson ALL HER life, Sophie Freud has been trying to emerge from the shadow cast over her by the family patriarch, Sigmund Freud, who died when she was only 14. As an American professor in social work, she dared to challenge his doctrine and was branded the black sheep of the family. Finally, she decided to stop talking about her grandfather altogether. "I got to the point where I'd start a lecture by saying no one was allowed to ask any questions about him," Sophie says, in the thick Viennese accent that belies her 50 years in the US.

"I do feel that I have achieved enough in my own right to be seen as a separate individual." Sophie, 66 and recently retired from Simmons College, Boston, lives alone in a glass-roofed log cabin in a dense Massachusetts forest. Her dustbins are plagued by foraging raccoons and scavengers in human form have pursued her just as vigorously. "I'm one of the most interviewed women of the western world; I do know I have been exploited because I'm a Freud," she says, without bitterness. In fact, Sophie has escaped the attention of the British media "I managed to live in London for a year without anyone noticing who I was" until this, her first British interview. She is soon to make her UK TV debut on Channel 4's Bad Ideas Of The 20th Century, a series that has picked her grandfather's theories as one of its subjects.

Thirty years ago, Sophie incurred the wrath of her grandfather's disciples by questioning psychoanalytical dogmas. "The inner circle made it plain I was not somebody to be included or taken seriously. As I like to be liked, I was not pleased." One of her criticisms was of Freud's comments on female sexuality, particularly the notion that mature women have vaginal rather than clitoral orgasms. "I said at my social work school, 'Can it really be true that you have to be emotionally mature to have the right kind of To me, the connection was not obvious. I began to un-brainwash myself." She went on to write papers attacking psychoanalytical doctrines, such as penis envy and the Oedipus complex.

Sophie's crusade against analysis has lost its zeal, although "all dogmatists still make me Her grandfather, she feels, is tainted by dogmatism: "He was always kind to ILLUSTRATIONS: WENDY HOLOEN the background truncated the ensuing discussion. Our Bodies Ourselves hedged its short section on not having children with nervous qualifiers: "Although our culture is rather resistant to the image of a non-nurturant woman, some of us feel we are not interested nor cut out to be mothers." (My italics.) For Judith Arcana, in Our Mothers' Daughters, not having children was "that difficult minority Ellen Peck, in a defensive and badly-written book called The Baby Trap, felt she had to justify her decision troubled marriage, to achieve a vicarious immortality through their genes, or because they neglect to use contraceptives. It also seems likely that the recession, which has put real jobs out of reach of many school-leavers, has made pregnancy an attractive option for teenage girls who thereby gain an identity and access to a mutually supportive network of other mothers. The 1970s produced a few feminist texts suggesting that it was all right for women not to want babies, but the charge of selfishness hovering in.