SUNDAY, JUNE 12 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C9
obituariesBY NEWS SERVICES
AND STAFF REPORTSJim Seals, who as part of the
duo Seals and Crofts crafted
memorably wistful 1970s hits
such as “Summer Breeze” and
“Diamond Girl,” died June 6 at
age 80.
His death was announced by
John Ford Coley, who had
formed the 1970s duo England
Dan and John Ford Coley with
Mr. Seals’s younger brother Dan.
Complete details were not im-
mediately available. He had a
stroke in 2017.
Mr. Seals and Darrell “Dash”
Crofts had known each other
since they were teenagers togeth-
er in bands in their native Texas.
They started Seals and Crofts in
the late 1960s and over the next
several years were among a wave
of soft-rock groups that also
included America and Bread.
With Mr. Seals as the primary
lead vocalist of the harmonizing
duo, Seals and Crofts had a string
of hits in the 1970s that included
“Summer Breeze” in 1972 and
“Diamond Girl” in 1973, both of
which reached No. 6. Another of
their tunes, “Get Closer,” sung
with Carolyn Willis, was a Top 10
hit in 1976.
Other songs that made the
charts included “We May Never
Pass This Way (Again)” (1973),
“I’ll Play for You” (1975), “Good-
bye Old Buddies” (1977) and
“You’re the Love” (1978).
The duo broke up in 1980 and
had a couple of short-lived re-
unions in the early 1990 s and
early 2000s. Mr. Seals also per-formed on occasion with his
brother Dan, who died in 2009.
For several years in the late
1950s and early 1960 s, both Seals
and Dash Crofts — who survives
his partner — were members of a
group that bore little stylisticsimilarity to their later act: the
Champs, although they joined
after that band had recorded its
signature hit, “Tequila.” Seals
played sax in that group, and
Crofts was on drums.
James Eugene Seals was bornOct. 17, 1941, in Sidney, Tex. His
father was in the oil business and
an amateur musician.
Young Jim began playing the
fiddle when he was about 5. In a
1952 contest in West Texas, Jim
won the fiddle division while his
father triumphed in the guitar
category.
Jim Seals later took up the
saxophone, which he played as a
young teenager in rock-and-roll
bands in Texas. In 1958, he and
Crofts joined the Champs — who
had recently had a No. 1 hit with
“Tequila” — and stayed with the
band until 1965, with Mr. Seals
on saxophone and Crofts on
drums.
Later, Mr. Seals played primar-
ily guitar and fiddle, while Crofts
played the mandolin.
The pair moved to Los Ange-
les, joined a group called the
Dawnbreakers and also played
for a time behind Glen Campbell.
Their manager, Marcia Day, was
a member of the Baha’i faith, and
the two musicians became Baha’i
adherents.
“It was the only thing I’d heard
that made sense to me, so I
responded to it,” Mr. Seals told
the Los Angeles Times in 1991.
“That began to spawn some ideas
to write songs that might help
people to understand, or help
ones who maybe couldn’t feel
anything or were cynical or cold.”Seals and Crofts stirred con-
troversy in 1974 by recording an
antiabortion song, “Unborn
Child,” in the wake of the Su-
preme Court’s Roe v. Wade deci-
sion. The belief that abortion was
wrong came out of their shared
Baha’i beliefs. They released the
song over the objections of their
label, Warner Bros.
“If we’d known it was going to
cause such disunity, we might
have thought twice about doing
it,” Mr. Seals later said.
After the duo broke up, Mr.
Seals moved with his wife and
three children to Costa Rica,
where they had a coffee farm. He
later settled in Nashville. Crofts
currently lives in Australia.
“Around 1980,” Mr. Seals told
the Los Angeles Times in 1991,
“we were still drawing 10,000 to
12,000 people at concerts. But we
could see, with this change com-
ing where everybody wanted
dance music, that those days
were numbered. We just decided
that it was a good time, after a
long run at it, to lie back and not
totally commit ourselves to that
kind of thing.”
Mr. Seals stopped performing
after his stroke in 2017. Besides
his brother, several cousins and
an uncle have been performers
or songwriters.
Survivors include his wife and
three children.JIM SEALS, 80
Lead vocalist of harmonizing duo Seals and Crofts rode ’70s soft-rock wave
MICHAEL PUTLAND/GETTY IMAGES
Darrell “Dash” Crofts, left, and Jim Seals circa 1972. Crofts and Mr. Seals had known each other since
they were teenagers in their native Texas and had a string of hits that included “Summer Breeze.”ents who play with them, who take
them to the circus, who come to
dinner every Sunday. I had short
audiences with my grandfather
every Sunday, but it was like going
to church. We talked very little. It
was very quiet,” she told the Globe.
“You couldn’t call it an intimate
relationship. But, on the other
hand, it was an important weekly
ritual that became an important
part of my life.”
Life for the Freud family be-
came intensely difficult after Nazi
Germany annexed Austria in the
Anschluss of 1938. The Nazis, who
had burned the works of Sigmund
Freud and other Jewish intellectu-
als, raided his home and confiscat-
ed his money. He immigrated to
England, where he died of cancer
in 1939 when Sophie Freud was 15.
His sisters perished in the Holo-
caust.
For Sophie Freud, the outbreak
of World War II physically divided
her family after it had already
been emotionally severed. Her fa-
ther and brother found haven in
England. She and her mother,
meanwhile, set out on a trek
across Europe, fleeing to Paris and
then, after the Nazi occupation of
that city in 1940, traveling by bicy-
cle to the French Riviera. After
stops in Casablanca and Lisbon,
they arrived in the United States
in 1942.
“I lost the belief relatively early
in life that we have rational con-
trol over our lives,” Dr. Freud told
the Telegram & Gazette of Worces-
ter, Mass.
Sophie Freud continued her
education in the United States un-
derwritten by a relative, Edward
Bernays, a leader in the field of
public relations, who was himself
the nephew of Sigmund Freud.
She received a bachelor’s degree in
psychology from Radcliffe College
in 1946, a master’s degree in social
work from Simmons College in
1948 and, eventually, a doctorate
in social welfare from Brandeis
University in 1970.
The year after receiving her
doctoral degree, she was hired as a
professor at Simmons College. She
took emeritus status in 1992 but
continued teaching until 2001.
Dr. Freud’s marriage to Paul
Loewenstein ended in divorce. Be-
sides her daughter, of Brooklyn,
survivors include another daugh-
ter, Dania Jekel of Newton, Mass.;
a son, George Loewenstein of
Pittsburgh; five grandchildren;
and two great-granddaughters.
In the final months of her life,
Dr. Freud’s family wrote in a death
notice published in the Globe, “she
often said that the act of living a
long and successful life was her
way to cheat Hitler, who had in-
tended her to perish in
Auschwitz.”
She was deeply anguished by
what she saw as the rise of fascism
in the United States, her daughter
said, and for years had been dis-
quieted by the “tendency we have
of giving a few people too much
power politically or intellectually.”
“I feel quite passionately that
this hero worship is our downfall,”
Dr. Freud told the Times Union of
Albany, N.Y., two decades ago. “We
live by sound bites and don’t use
our minds.”She dismissed “penis envy,” a
developmental stage that Sig-
mund Freud attributed to young
girls, as “nonsense” and the ideas
of a “3-year-old boy.”
Of her grandfather’s theory of
the parent-child dynamic, she dry-
ly remarked, “I have some ques-
tions about this Oedipal relation-
ship.”
She found particularly flawed
her grandfather’s understanding
of female patients. “My grandfa-
ther was a good and loving man,”
Dr. Freud told the Associated
Press, “but he understood nothing
about a woman’s sexuality.”
Dr. Freud saw value in her
grandfather’s notions of uncon-
scious motives and defense mech-
anisms, as well as in some of his
ideas about the role played in the
human psyche by unexplored
childhood experience. But there
was a limit, she argued, in cease-
lessly revisiting that experience,
as psychoanalysts traditionally
challenged patients on their
couches to do.
“My message is you have the
chance to change the way you
think about life without having to
go back and redo it all,” she once
told a gathering of social workers.
“There are so many paths to a
person. All you have to do is un-
pack another self who has been
waiting to be unpacked anyway.
And then go with that self instead
of the messed-up self that you’ve
been attached to.”
Dr. Freud explored her own life
in two books, “My Three Mothers
and Other Passions” (1988) and
“Living in the Shadow of the Freud
Family” (2007). That shadow was
long, and in her darker moments,
she said she saw her grandfather,
with his legions of unquestioning
adherents, as one of the “false
prophets of the 20th century”
along with Adolf Hitler, both set
on forcing on “other men ... the
one and only truth that they had
come upon.”
Miriam Sophie Freud was born
in Vienna on Aug. 6, 1924. Her
father, Martin, one of Sigmund
Freud’s six children, ran a psycho-
analytic publishing house. Her
mother, the former Esti Drucker,
was a speech therapist who helped
Sophie move beyond a learning
disability.
The family had a miserable
home life, with “quarrels, tears
and violent hysterical scenes [as]
the background music of my child-
hood,” Dr. Freud wrote in “My
Three Mothers.” Esti, she ob-
served, had “married a fairy tale
prince, a son of Sigmund Freud, a
handsome charming knight
whose shiny armor quickly tar-
nished.”
Reflecting on the conflict be-
tween her parents, Sophie Freud
wryly observed that her grandfa-
ther did “not believe in marital
therapy, at least in this case.” As for
herself, she joked to the Globe in
2002 that she was “still patting
[herself] on the shoulder” for the
fact that she had never undergone
psychoanalysis.
Amid that emotional upheaval,
Sigmund Freud was a distant but
nonetheless towering presence in
her childhood.
“Some people have grandpar-BY EMILY LANGERSophie Freud, who emerged
from the crucible of her early life,
marked by Nazi persecution in
Europe and abiding family dis-
cord, to become a professor, social
worker and writer who disclaimed
many tenets of her grandfather
Sigmund’s psychoanalytic theory,
died June 3 at her home in Lin-
coln, Mass. She was 97.
The cause was pancreatic can-
cer, said her daughter Andrea
Freud Loewenstein.
The daughter of Sigmund
Freud’s eldest son, Sophie Freud
was the last surviving grandchild
of the Viennese doctor who revo-
lutionized conceptions of the hu-
man mind with the introduction
of psychoanalysis at the turn of the
20th century.
Rooted in the workings of the
unconscious mind, as well as
Freud’s ideas about competition
between the superego and id and
the revelations hidden within
dreams, psychoanalytic theory
has since been largely supplanted
by other schools of therapeutic
thought. But Sigmund Freud’s in-
fluence persists in fields from psy-
chiatry to literature, and his se-
vere, bearded face remains one of
the most famous visages of his era.
During Sophie Freud’s girlhood
in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s,
her grandfather received her for
weekly visits in his office at Berg-
gasse 19. She recalled him as lov-
ing, and ever ready with spare
change to send her on her way to
the theater. She described her con-
nection to the father of psycho-
analysis as both a “blessing” and a
“curse” — a blessing because it
heightened attention on her own
professional work, and a curse
because her family name at times
seemed to overshadow all else.
“I got to the point where I’d
start a lecture by saying no one
was allowed to ask any questions
about him,” Dr. Freud told the
London Guardian in 1993. “I do
feel that I have achieved enough in
my own right to be seen as a
separate individual.”
By all accounts she had. Dr.
Freud, who had taken refuge in the
United States during World War
II, spent decades as a professor of
social work at what is now Sim-
mons University in Boston, where
she chaired the human behavior
program. Trained as a psychiatric
social worker, she volunteered at a
counseling center for the poor,
aiming especially to assist single
mothers and other populations
she considered underserved by
the social work profession. She
was easily recognized wherever
she went, tooling around on a red
motorbike, which she determined
to be the most efficient way to get
from here to there. In a trait
shared with her grandfather, she
detested the waste of time.
His legacy at times proved diffi-
cult for her to escape. People often
asked Dr. Freud for her opinion of
his psychoanalytic theories. She
offered it, unvarnished.
“I’m very skeptical about much
of psychoanalysis,” she told the
Boston Globe in 2002. “I think it’s
such a narcissistic indulgence that
I cannot believe in it.”
SOPHIE FREUD, 97
Professor challenged her grandfather’s famous doctrine
SOPHIE BASSOULS/CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES
Sophie Freud, Sigmund Freud's granddaughter, in 2008. Dr. Freud challenged many tenets of her
grandfather’s psychoanalytic theory and found his understanding of female sexuality especially f lawed.Sigmund Freud’s legacy at times proved difficult for SophieFreud to escape. People often asked for her opinion of hergrandfather’s psychoanalytic theories. She offered it,unvarnished. “I’m very skeptical about much ofpsychoanalysis,” she told the Boston Globe in 2002. “I think it’ssuch a narcissistic indulgence that I cannot believe in it.”