ABSTRACT
In a few minutes in 1996, all in a rush, I wrote a monologue for the character of Amalia Freud, Sigmund's mother, for my play Call Me Crazy. While raising my children, I had foregone the temptation to continue the acting I had loved as a child and teenager, and after obtaining my PhD in 1973 had worked as a clinical psychologist and activist and spent years teaching psychology to undergraduates and graduate students. After both of my children had left home, I returned to theater as an actor (while continuing to work as a psychologist and activist) and then decided to try my hand at playwriting. Call Me Crazy was my first play, and from the moment I imagined writing Amalia's monologue I saw her as my mother's mother, Esther Milner Karchmer. Esther was a dear heart of a woman, tiny, sparkly, mischievous, smart as a whip, and utterly unassuming. The more I read about Amalia Freud, the more I learned about her life, the more I imagined my Gram in her place. When I learned that Amalia died at the age of 95, it struck me that she had lived to see her son become famous, and then I tried to imagine how she might have felt about his fame and his theories, many of which were misogynist or otherwise perhaps simply embarrassing to a woman of her era. The monologue thus reflects not only the facts of Amalia's life but also much of Gram's manner as well as her attitudes and values. Amalia, after listening with growing impatience to some of the horrible nonsense spoken by some of today's worst psychotherapists can stay silent no longer and breaks into the play:
(AMALIA FREUD enters, dancing, to “The Blue Danube, “ then speaks to the audience)
