Esti Freud


Ernestine "Esti" Freud was an Austrian–American speech therapist.

Life

Ernestine Drucker was the eldest of three daughters of the lawyer Leopold Drucker and Ida Schramek, who came from a wealthy family.
Ernestine Drucker attended the Schwarzwald School and then the public girls’ lyceum. She also took acting lessons with Ferdinand Gregori. During the First World War, Drucker worked for a year as a volunteer nurse. Her parents did not allow the Matura or further study, as they considered it detrimental to her marriage prospects; instead, she was permitted to take lessons in speech and lyrical interpretation with the retired Burgtheater actress Olga Lewinsky. Freud later occasionally appeared as a reciter.
In December 1919 Esti Drucker married the lawyer Jean-Martin Freud, the eldest son of the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud. They had two children, Anton Walter and Miriam Sophie. In addition to her family responsibilities, Freud taught speech at the Schwarzwald schools. In September 1926 she began training in speech, voice and hearing therapy as a trainee with Emil Fröschels at the Vienna University Clinic and from September 1927 worked as his unpaid assistant. In Eos. Zeitschrift für Heilpädagogik she reported in 1929 on her observations from work with children with speech disorders at the outpatient clinic. She also gave courses in correct spoken German and speech technique at Viennese adult education centres and at the vocational school of the Vienna merchants’ association.
From the summer semester of 1932, Freud was employed as a “Lecturer in Speech Technique and Voice Training” at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Vienna and offered courses open to all faculties in “Speech Technique, Breathing and Voice Training” as well as “Exercises for Speech and Voice Disorders”. Payment consisted only of tuition fees.
In 1938, after the Anschluss of Austria to Nazi Germany, her father died under the impact of the November pogroms. On 22 April 1938, Esti Freud was dismissed from her teaching assignment at the university on racist grounds. As the couple had already grown apart, the son Walter emigrated with his father to London. Esti Freud emigrated in May 1938 with her daughter Sophie first to Paris, where her sisters lived.
In Paris, Freud published articles in French on speech therapy and speech defects in the journal Practica Oto-Rhino-Laryngologica. Following the German conquest of France, she fled with her daughter in June 1940 to Nice, and in December 1941 they reached Casablanca; in October 1942 they were able to enter the United States via Lisbon. Her mother, after fleeing to France, was imprisoned in 1942 in the Drancy internment camp and deported from there to Auschwitz concentration camp, where she was murdered.
In New York, at the Manhattan Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Hospital, she obtained an unpaid position as a speech therapist, which she held for 17 years. She also worked without pay at the Cornell Medical College to establish a speech clinic. In 1946 she received her first regularly paid part-time position as a speech and voice therapist for children after cleft palate operations in the plastic surgery department of the New York Hospital.
Freud obtained U.S. citizenship in 1948. To improve her career prospects, she attended evening classes at the New School for Social Research and in 1955 earned a Ph.D. there with the dissertation “The social implications of language disturbances”. She participated in the International Congresses of Speech Therapy in Amsterdam, Madrid, Barcelona, Copenhagen and Paris, delivering a total of three lectures at these meetings. After her retirement from NY Hospital in 1971, she continued to work in the profession until 1978.
At the request of her daughter Sophie Freud, she wrote the autobiography Vignettes of my Life at the age of 82. Her urn was interred in the grave of her father at the Vienna Central Cemetery.

Works

  • Esti D. Freud: The social implications of language disturbances. Ph.D., New School for Social Research, 1955
  • Esti Freud: Speech Therapy. Experiences with Patients Who Had Undergone Total Laryngectomy. In: Archives of Otolaryngology 48/2, pp. 50–52.
  • Esti Freud: Speech rehabilitation of patients with cleft palate. In: Archives of Otolaryngology 51/5, pp. 685–695.
  • Esti Freud: Clinical language rehabilitation of the veteran – methods and result. In: American Journal of Psychiatry 107/12, pp. 881–889.
  • Esti Freud: Speech Therapy. Experiences with Patients Who Had Undergone Total Laryngectomy – Recent Trends in Aphasic Research. In: American Journal of Psychiatry 110/3, pp. 186–193.
  • Esti D. Freud: Functions and dysfunctions of the ventricular folds. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders 27/4, 1962.
  • Esti D. Freud: Common vocal disturbances and suggestions for therapy. Logopedie en foniatrie 35/5, 1963.
  • Esti Drucker Freud: Vignettes of my life 1899–1979. , at: Leo Baeck Institute, New York, Memoir Collection.
  • * Excerpt in: Andreas Lixl-Purcell : Women of Exile: German-Jewish Autobiographies since 1933. Greenwood, Westport 1988, ISBN 0-313-25921-6, pp. 103–108.
  • * Excerpt in German translation in: Albert Lichtblau : Als hätten wir dazugehört. Böhlau, Vienna 1999, pp. 578–597.
  • Sophie Freud: Im Schatten der Familie Freud. Meine Mutter erlebt das 20. Jahrhundert. Translation by Erica Fischer and Sophie Freud. Claassen, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-546-00398-5.