Marie Bonaparte

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Marie Bonaparte
Princess George of Greece and Denmark
Born	(1882-07-02)2 July 1882 Saint-Cloud, French Third Republic
Died	21 September 1962(1962-09-21) (aged 80) Saint-Tropez, France
Burial	Royal Cemetery, Tatoi Palace, Greece
Spouse	Prince George of Greece and Denmark ​ ​ (m. 1907; died 1957)​
Issue	Prince Peter Princess Eugénie
House	Bonaparte
Father	Roland Napoléon Bonaparte, 6th Prince of Canino and Musignano
Mother	Marie-Félix Blanc

Princess Marie Bonaparte (2 July 1882 – 21 September 1962), known as Princess George of Greece and Denmark upon her marriage, was a French author and psychoanalyst, closely linked with Sigmund Freud. Her wealth contributed to the popularity of psychoanalysis and enabled Freud's escape from Nazi Germany.

Marie Bonaparte was a great-grandniece of Emperor

She was born at

Several candidates for future husband presented themselves or were considered by Prince Roland for his daughter's hand, notably a distant cousin of the princely

On 21 November 1907 in Paris, Marie and George were married in a civil ceremony, with a subsequent Greek Orthodox ceremony on 12 December 1907, at Athens.^[1] Thereafter she was known as Princess George of Greece and Denmark.

By March 1908 Marie was pregnant and, as agreed, the couple returned to France to take up residence. When George brought his bride to Denmark for the first visit with his uncle, Prince Valdemar's wife, Marie d'Orléans, was at pains to explain to Marie Bonaparte the intimacy which united uncle and nephew, so deep that at the end of each of George's several yearly visits to Bernstorff he would weep, Valdemar would fall sick, and the women learned the patience not to intrude upon their husbands' private moments.^[2] During the first of these visits, Marie Bonaparte and Valdemar found themselves engaging in the kind of passionate intimacies she had looked forward to with her husband who, however, only seemed to enjoy them vicariously, sitting or lying beside his wife and uncle.^[2] On a later visit, Marie Bonaparte carried on a passionate flirtation with Prince Aage, Count of Rosenborg, Valdemar's eldest son. In neither case does it appear that George objected, or felt obliged to give the matter any attention.^[2] Marie Bonaparte came to admire the forbearance and independence of Valdemar's wife under circumstances which caused her bewilderment and estrangement from her own husband.^[2]

Although Marie occasionally joined her husband in Greece or elsewhere for national holidays and dynastic ceremonies, their life together was spent mostly on her estates in the French countryside. For months at a time, George was in Athens or Copenhagen, while Marie was in Paris, Vienna or traveling with the couple's children. That pattern allowed each to pursue activities in which the other had little interest.^[2]

The couple had two children, Peter (1908–1980) and Eugénie (1910–1989).^[1]

From 1913 to early 1916, Marie carried on an intense flirtation with French prime minister Aristide Briand, but went no further because she did not want to share him with his mistress, the actress Berthe Cerny. Matters came to a head in April 1916, when Berthe Cerny broke off the relationship.^[5] The affair with Briand lasted until May 1919. In 1915 Briand wrote to her that, having come to know and like Prince George, he felt guilty about their secret passion. George tried to persuade him that Greece, officially neutral during

Despite what she described as sexual dysfunction, Marie Bonaparte conducted affairs with Sigmund Freud's disciple Rudolph Loewenstein as well as Aristide Briand, her husband's aide-de-camp Lembessiss, a prominent married French physician, and possibly others.^[2] Troubled by her difficulty in achieving sexual fulfillment, Marie engaged in research.^[6] In 1924, she published her results under the pseudonym A. E. Narjani and presented her theory of frigidity in the medical journal Bruxelles-Médical, having measured the distance between the vagina and the clitoral glans in 200 women.^[7][8] After analyzing their sexual history she concluded that the distance between these two organs was critical for the ability to reach orgasm (volupté) during vaginal intercourse. She identified women with a short distance (the paraclitoridiennes) who reached orgasm easily during intercourse, and women with a distance of more than two and a half centimeters (the téleclitoridiennes) who had difficulties while the mesoclitoriennes were in between.^[2][9] Bonaparte considered herself a téleclitorienne and approached Josef Halban to surgically move her clitoris closer to her vagina. She underwent and published the procedure as the Halban–Narjani operation.^[9] When it proved unsuccessful in facilitating the sought-after outcome for Marie, the physician repeated the operation.^[2][10]

She modeled for the Romanian

In 1925, Marie consulted Freud for treatment of what she described as her frigidity, which was later explained as a failure to have orgasms during missionary position intercourse.^[11] It was to Marie Bonaparte that 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?'".^[12]

Although Prince George maintained friendly relations with Freud, in 1925 he asked Marie to give up her work in psychoanalytical studies and treatment to devote herself to their family life, but she declined.^[2]

Robed in the diplomatic immunity of a member of a reigning European royal family and possessed of great wealth, Marie was often able to help those threatened or despoiled by World War II. When the Greek royal family were in exile or Greece was under occupation, she helped support her husband's banished relatives, including allowing the family of her husband's nephew,

Later she paid Freud's

In 1938, Bonaparte proposed that the United States purchase Baja California and turn it into a new Jewish state. Freud refused to take what he called her "colonial plans" seriously, but Bonaparte nonetheless authored letters to William Christian Bullitt Jr. and Franklin D. Roosevelt to advocate for the idea.^[15]

Later life

On 2 June 1953, Marie and her husband represented their nephew, King Paul of Greece, at the coronation of Elizabeth II in London. Bored with the pageantry, Marie offered a sampling of the psychoanalytic method to the gentleman seated next to her, the future French president François Mitterrand. Mitterrand obliged Marie, and the pair barely witnessed the pomp and ceremony, finding their own dialogue far more interesting.^[2]

She practiced as a psychoanalyst until her death in 1962, providing substantial services to the development and promotion of psychoanalysis. She authored several books on psychoanalysis,^[1] translated Freud's work into French and founded the French Institute of Psychoanalysis (Société Psychoanalytique de Paris SPP) in 1926.^[2] In addition to her own work and preservation of Freud's legacy, she also offered financial support for Géza Róheim's anthropological explorations. A scholar on Edgar Allan Poe, she wrote a biography and an interpretation of his work.

Bonaparte's translation of a sentence in Freud's thirty-first Vorlesung ('lecture'), Wo Es war, soll Ich werden, generated some controversy. Strachey translated it into English as "Where Id was, Ego shall be".^[16] Lacan, arguing that Freud used "das Es" (lit. 'the It') and "das Ich" (lit. 'the I') when he intended the meaning to be "Id" and "Ego", suggested "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" be translated "Where It was, there shall I come to be".^[17] Bonaparte translated it into French as le moi doit déloger le ça, meaning in English roughly "Ego must dislodge Id", which according to Lacan is directly contrary to Freud's intended meaning.^[18]

Death

Bonaparte died of

The story of her relationship with Sigmund Freud, including assisting his family's escape into exile, was made into a television film in 2004 as Princesse Marie [fr], directed by Benoît Jacquot, starring Catherine Deneuve as Princess Marie Bonaparte and Heinz Bennent as Freud.

Honours

Dynastic

• Greek royal family:
  • Grand Cross of the Royal Order of Saints Olga and Sophia, 1st Class^[19][20][21]
  • Commander of the
    Royal Order of Beneficence
  • Recipient of the Royal Decoration of the Greek Royal House, 2nd Class
  • Recipient of the Royal Red Cross Medal^[19]

Foreign

• House of Hohenzollern: Dame of the Imperial and Royal Decoration of the Cross of Merit^[19]
•  United Kingdom: Recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal

Ancestry

Works

• "Le Printemps sur mon Jardin." Paris: Flammarion, 1924.
• "Topsy, chow-chow, au poil d'or." Paris: Denoel et steele, 1937.
• The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation with a foreword by Sigmund Freud – 1934 (translated into English, 1937)
• Topsy – 1940 – a love story about her dog
• "La Mer et le Rivage." Paris: for the author, 1940.
• "Monologues Devant la Vie et la Mort." London: Imago Publishing Co., 1951.
• "De la Sexualite de la Femme." Paris: Press Universitaires de France, 1951.
• "Psychanalyse et Anthropologie." Paris: Press Universitaires de France, 1952.
• "Chronos, Eros, Thanatos." London: Imago Publishing Co., 1952.
• "Psychanalyse et Biologique." Paris: Press Universitaires de France, 1952.
• Five Copy Books – 1952
• Female Sexuality – 1953
• "A La Mémoire Des Disparus" London: Chorley & Pickersgill Ltd., 1953

See also

• Princess X, the 1916 bronze sculpture by Brâncuși

References

Bibliography

• Bertin, Celia, Marie Bonaparte: A Life, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1982.
  ISBN 0-15-157252-6
• Loewenstein, Rudolf, Drives, Affects and Behavior: Essays in Honor of Marie Bonaparte, 1952

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Marie Bonaparte.

• Société Psychanalytique de Paris: Marie Bonaparte et la création de la SPP (in French)