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He wanted to lead the human race through a jungle whose exploration he pioneered: a tangled place of compulsions, obsessions, neuroses, and phobias, all ruled by three gods he named id, ego, and superego. Sigmund Freud's revolutionary attempts to map this jungle, called the psyche, earned him the title of the Father of Psychoanalysis. But Freud was also a more conventional sort of father. He begat six children, who in turn had sons and daughters who had more children. Today, eight of these Freuds have carved out notable niches of their own-some in ways that might make even their most famous ancestor blush. Recently, publishers on both sides of the Atlantic have been touting a first novel called Sexual Intercourse, by Rose Boyt, a great-granddaughter of Freud. Other scions include the writer of a candid confessional and a TV talk- show host who conducted interviews in bed. Here are brief accounts of how these offspring, or contemporary Freudian slips, are faring. Anna,a sister of Freud Edward Bernays' uncle made a science out of exposing the unconscious motives that can make people look worse than we thought they were. Sigmund's nephew invented public relations, which is the science of finding images that make people look better than we know they are. Bernays, 98, wrote Crystallizing Public Opinion, a book that helped trigger the image-making avalanche, and he served as PR counsel to everyone from Caruso to Eisenhower. Bernays claims credit for changing American sexual habits: In 1913 he produced a play about venereal disease called Damaged Goods. ''Before that,'' he claims, ''(Americans) had never heard the words gonorrhea or syphilis.''
Like her great-uncle, Anne Bernays, 60, leads a book-filled, bourgeois life; unlike him, she's not interested in the dark underside of propriety. She lives with husband Justin Kaplan (who won a Pulitzer for his Mark Twain biography) in Cambridge, Mass., where she teaches writing, plays Scrabble with other writers, and dabbles in choral music. She strayed but once, setting out to write a book about women and psychoanalysis. ''It was a terrible mismatch,'' she says. Instead, she writes fiction. Her most recent novel, Professor Romeo, which may soon be made into a movie, might have intrigued her great-uncle, though. It's about a professorial libido running amok.
Ernst, Freud's youngest son Lucian Freud, 68, is a premier realist, painting portraits that, like his grandfather's case histories, pay remarkably minute attention to the often unflattering details of humankind. His subjects, who pose nude for as many as 150 sittings, are rewarded with a thorough disclosure of the bumps, pores, and hair that adorn their skin. By contrast, Lucian himself treasures the privacy of his London studio, but he is also known to love gossip, gambling, and old cars. In 1959, on the occasion of his 16th traffic violation, a judge observed that Freud was ''temperamentally unfit to drive a car,'' adding that he had ''better see a psychiatrist.''
