Esther Freud Esther Freud Esther Freud (born 2 May 1963) is a British novelist. Born in London, Freud is the daughter of painter Lucian Freud and Bernardine Coverley. She is also a great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud and niece of Clement Freud. She travelled extensively with her mother as a child, and returned to London at the age of 16 to train as an actress at The Drama Centre. She has worked in television and theatre as both actress and writer. Her first credited television appearance, though inauspicious, was as a terrified diner in "The Bill" in 1984, running frantically out of a
Sigmund Freud event, at which Freud was awarded an Honorary Doctorate, marked the first public recognition of Freud's work and attracted widespread media interest. Freud's audience included the distinguished neurologist and psychiatrist James Jackson Putnam, Professor of Diseases of the Nervous System at Harvard, who invited Freud to his country retreat where they held extensive discussions over a period of four days. Putnam's subsequent public endorsement of Freud's work represented a significant breakthrough for the psychoanalytic cause in the United States. When Putnam and Jones organised the founding of the American Psychoanalytic Association in May 1911 they were elected president and secretary