Sophie Freud, who emerged from the crucible of her early life, marked by Nazi persecution in Europe and abiding family discord, 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 Lincoln, Mass. She was 97.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, 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 revolutionized conceptions of the human 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 influence persists in fields from psychiatry to literature, and his severe, 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 Berggasse 19. She recalled him as loving, and ever ready with spare change to send her on her way to the theater. She described her connection to the father of psychoanalysis 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 Simmons 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 difficult 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.”

She dismissed “penis envy,” a developmental stage that Sigmund 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 dryly remarked, “I have some questions about this Oedipal relationship.”

She found particularly flawed her grandfather’s understanding of female patients. “My grandfather 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 unconscious motives and defense mechanisms, 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 ceaselessly 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 unpack 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 that 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 psychoanalytic 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 childhood,” Dr. Freud wrote in “My Three Mothers.” Esti, she observed, had “married a fairy tale prince, a son of Sigmund Freud, a handsome charming knight whose shiny armor quickly tarnished.”

Reflecting on the conflict between her parents, Sophie Freud wryly observed that her grandfather 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 grandparents 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 became 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 intellectuals, raided his home and confiscated his money. He immigrated to England, where he died of cancer in 1939, when Sophie Freud was 15. His sisters perished in the Holocaust.

For Sophie Freud, the outbreak of World War II physically divided her family after it had already been emotionally severed. Her father and brother found safe 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 bicycle 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 control over our lives,” Dr. Freud told the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester, Mass.

Sophie Freud continued her education in the United States underwritten 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 PhD 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. Besides her daughter, of Brooklyn, survivors include another daughter, 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 intended 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 disquieted 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.”