Roland Bonaparte
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Princess Marie Bonaparte (July 2 1882-September 21 1962) was a French psychoanalyst, closely linked with Sigmund Freud. Her wealth contributed to the popularity of psychoanalysis, and enabled Freud's escape from Nazi Germany. Her story of her relationship with Sigmund Freud and how she helped his family escape into exile was made into a television film, released in 2004. Princesse Marie YouTube was directed by Benoît Jacquot and starred Catherine Deneuve as Marie Bonaparte, and Heinz Bennent as Sigmund Freud.
Stories of sexual dysfunction
According to the 2008 book Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex by Mary Roach, Marie first consulted Sigmund Freud for treatment of what she described as her frigidity, which was later described as a failure to have orgasms during missionary position intercourse. After conducting research on women's orgasms, she concluded the reason was the distance between clitoris and vagina. She called those, like herself, the "téléclitoridiennes" -- "she of the distant clitoris." She then attempted to "cure" her own failure to orgasm by having her clitoris moved, surgically, closer to her vagina; although the removal worked, the reattachment was not successful. It was to Marie Bonaparte that Sigmund Freud remarked, "The great question that has never been answered and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’". She later paid Freud's ransom to Nazi Germany, and preserved Freud's letters to Wilhelm Fliess despite Freud's wish that they be destroyed.
Despite what she described as sexual dysfunction, she later conducted affairs with Freud's disciple Rudolph Loewenstein, and Aristide Briand, the Prime Minister of France.
Biography
Marie Bonaparte was a great-grand-niece of Napoleon I of France. She was a daughter of Roland Bonaparte (19 May, 1858 - 14 April, 1924) and Marie-Félix Blanc (1859-1882). Her paternal grandfather was Pierre Napoleon Bonaparte, son of Lucien Bonaparte, and nephew of Napoleon. Her maternal grandfather was François Blanc, the principal real-estate developer of Monte Carlo.
She was born at Saint-Cloud, a town in Hauts-de-Seine, Île-de-France. Her mother died of an embolism induced by giving birth to Marie.
On 21 November 1907, at Paris, she married the homosexual Prince George of Greece in a civil ceremony, with a subsequent religious ceremony on 12 December 1907, at Athens. She was thereafter officially also known as Princess Marie of Greece and Denmark. They had two children, Peter (1908-1980) and Eugénie (1910-1988).
On 2nd June 1953, Marie and her husband Prince George represented their nephew, King Paul of Greece, at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in London. Bored with the pomp and ceremony, Marie offered to psychoanalyse the gentleman seated next to her who was the future French president François Mitterrand. Mitterrand obliged Marie and the couple barely witnessed any part of the coronation, but found their activities far more interesting than the lengthy and formal ceremony.
She practiced as a psychoanalyst until her death in 1962, providing many services to the cause of psychoanalysis. She founded the French Institute of Psychoanalysis (Société Psychoanalytique de Paris SPP) in 1926. In addition to her own work and preservation of Freud's legacy, she also offered financial support for Geza Roheim's anthropological explorations.
She died of leukemia in Saint-Tropez, was cremated in Marseilles, and her ashes were interred in Prince George's tomb at Tatoï, near Athens.
Works
- Topsy - 1940 - a love story about her dog.
- The Life and Works of E. A. Poe: a Psychoanalytic Interpretation (1949), E. A. Poe
- Five Copy Books - 1952
- Feminine Sexuality - 1953
