Amalia Freud


Amalia Malka Nathansohn Freud was the mother of Sigmund Freud. She was born in Brody in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria to Jakob Nathanson and Sara Wilenz and later grew up in Odesa, where her mother came from. She was married to Jacob Freud in 1855.
Amalia Freud died of tuberculosis in Vienna at the age of 95.

Children

On 6 May 1856, when Amalia Freud was still 20 years old, she gave birth to her first child by her husband Jacob Freud, Sigmund Schlomo, who became a famous neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis.
Amalia was almost always pregnant in the decade following Sigmund's birth, giving birth to seven more children in just nine years, of which six lived to adulthood. However, none of her other children became as renowned as their eldest brother. They are enumerated below in the consecutive order of their births:
Amalia was considered by her grandchildren to be an intelligent, strong-willed, quick-tempered but egotistical personality. Ernest Jones saw her as lively and humorous, with a strong attachment to her eldest son whom she called "mein goldener Sigi".

Relationship with eldest son

Just as Amalia idolised her eldest son, so there is evidence that the latter in turn idealised his mother, whose domineering hold over his life he never fully analysed. He did however recount a railway journey with her at the age of 4 amongst his earliest memories and also recalled her instruction in German reading and writing. Late in life he would term the mother-son relationship "the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of all human relationships. A mother can transfer to her son the ambition she has been obliged to suppress in herself". His tendency to split off and repudiate hostile elements in the relationship would be repeated with significant figures in his life such as his fiancée and Wilhelm Fliess.