 He is the great-grandson of the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, who himself was the uncle of Edward Bernays, the Austrian-American pioneer of public relations.Freud Communications was bought in 1994 by another independent UK agency, Abbott Mead Vickers (AMV), for about 10 million pounds only for Matthew Freud, together with other partners, to buy back the company in 2001, for a similar sum, when AMV was itself purchased by the US group Omnicom.Freud Communications USA, which closed in February 2009, was based in New York City.