Marie Bonaparte
1882–1962 · French writer and psychoanalyst, princess of Greece and Denmark by marriage
Marie Bonaparte (Saint-Cloud, 1882 - Gassin, 1962) was a French writer and psychoanalyst who, through her marriage, became a princess of Greece and Denmark. She belonged to a branch of the Bonaparte family without dynastic rights, and she inherited a large fortune from her maternal grandfather, the property developer François Blanc, the main figure behind Monte Carlo. Her importance lies in having placed that wealth at the service of the young psychoanalytic movement, working closely with Sigmund Freud.
Her mother died shortly after she was born, and she grew up with her father, the geographer and botanist Roland Bonaparte, moving between Paris and family estates under the supervision of tutors. As a young woman she suffered from phobias and hypochondria, and she spent long periods reading and keeping personal journals. In 1907 she married Prince George of Greece, first in a civil ceremony in Paris and then in a religious one in Athens. The marriage was largely a separate one, with him spending months in Athens or Copenhagen and her in France, and they had two children.
After seeking help for her sexual difficulties, Bonaparte entered treatment with Freud and eventually trained as a psychoanalyst herself. She put her fortune behind the movement: she helped Freud and his family leave Nazi Germany, funded anthropological research by Géza Róheim, and supported James Strachey's project of the first complete English translation of Freud's works. In 1926 she was one of the founders of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society.
She wrote a psychoanalytic study of Edgar Allan Poe, a book about her dog Topsy, and Female Sexuality, which gathered her research on frigidity. Her legacy rests mainly on spreading psychoanalysis in France and on preserving Freud's work and correspondence.
Key ideas
- Frigidity and female sexuality: she proposed that difficulty reaching orgasm depended on the distance between the vagina and the clitoris, based on measurements of 200 women.
- Psychoanalysis applied to literature: she studied Poe's work, looking in his texts for traces of the author's life and mind.
- Psychoanalysis and anthropology: she supported research that linked psychoanalytic theory with the study of other cultures.
- Psychology of antisemitism: she wrote about its psychological causes, using psychoanalysis to understand social phenomena.
Curiosities
A joke at a coronation
At Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953 she was so bored that she joked about psychoanalysing the man seated beside her, who turned out to be François Mitterrand. Twenty-eight years later, Mitterrand became President of the French Republic.
A scandalous portrait
The Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși used Bonaparte as a model for Princess X, which caused a scandal in 1919 because it showed her as a large polished bronze phallus. The artist later claimed it was a misunderstanding.
Original Filopedia text based on Wikipedia (es) and Wikipedia (en) and Wikidata.