The Freud family tree begins with Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the founder of psychoanalysis, and branches into an unusually broad spread of talents — psychology, painting, politics, broadcasting, and the invention of modern public relations. Sigmund and his wife Martha Bernays had six children, the youngest of whom, Anna Freud, became the most direct heir to his work, pioneering child psychoanalysis and guarding his intellectual legacy after the family fled Nazi Vienna for London in 1938.
The distinctive thing about the Freuds is how far the ability diffused sideways and downward rather than simply repeating the father's profession. Through Sigmund's son Ernst, an architect, came two remarkable grandsons: Lucian Freud, who became one of the twentieth century's greatest figurative painters, and Clement Freud, a broadcaster, food writer, and Member of Parliament. The line continued into media and public life with Clement's descendants, among them the broadcaster Emma Freud and the public-relations executive Matthew Freud.
One branch links the family directly to the machinery of modern persuasion. Sigmund's nephew Edward Bernays — doubly related, since his mother was Freud's sister and his father was the brother of Freud's wife — took his uncle's theories of the unconscious and turned them into the foundations of the public-relations industry, earning the title 'the father of public relations.'
It is a striking genealogical arc: within three generations, a family that began by mapping the hidden drives of the human mind produced both the painter who exposed the body without flattery and the publicist who learned to steer those same hidden drives to sell cigarettes and soap.
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