Marie Bonaparte

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 Napoleon I of France. She was the only child of Roland Napoléon Bonaparte, 6th Prince of Canino and Musignano (1858–1924) and Marie-Félix Blanc (1859–1882). Her paternal grandfather was Prince Pierre Napoleon Bonaparte, son of Lucien Bonaparte, 1st Prince of Canino and Musignano, Napoleon's rebellious younger brother. For this reason, despite her title, Marie was not a member of the dynastic branch of the Bonapartes who claimed the French imperial throne from exile. Her maternal grandfather, François Blanc, had left an estimated fortune of FF 88M when he died in 1877. However, his widow, born Marie Hensel, left mostly debts for her three children, including Marie's mother Marie-Félix, to pay off upon her death in July 1881. Prince Roland protected his wife's fortune by persuading her to renounce that of her late mother before the amount of her debts became known. he courted her for twenty-eight days, confiding that from 1883, he'd lived not at his father's Greek court in Athens, but at Bernstorff Palace near Copenhagen with Prince Valdemar of Denmark, his father's youngest brother. The Queen had taken the boy to Denmark to enlist him in the Danish royal navy and consigned him to the care of Valdemar, who was an admiral in the Danish fleet. Feeling abandoned by his father on this occasion, George described to his fiancée the profound attachment he developed for his uncle. He admitted that, contrary to what he knew were her hopes, he could not commit to living permanently in France since he was obligated to undertake royal duties in Greece or on its behalf if summoned to do so. The value of her father's estate of 60 million francs was worth approximlately £484,000 to £1,320,000 during the 1920s owing to the significant fluctuations in the foreign exchange rate of the French franc during this period.

Marie's mother had reportedly brought her husband a dowry worth 8,400,000 francs in 1880, as well as a reversionary right to a further 6,000,000 francs which she would receive after her mother's death.

Married life

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. 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 World War I but whose King was suspected of sympathy for the Central Powers, really hoped for an Allied victory: He may have influenced Briand to support the Allied expedition against the Bulgarians at Salonika. 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. After analyzing their sexual history she concluded that the distance between these two organs was critical for the ability to reach orgasm during vaginal intercourse. She identified women with a short distance (the ) who reached orgasm easily during intercourse, and women with a distance of more than two and a half centimeters (the ) who had difficulties while the were in between. Bonaparte considered herself a and approached Josef Halban to surgically move her clitoris closer to her vagina. She underwent and published the procedure as the Halban–Narjani operation.

She modeled for the Romanian modernist sculptor Constantin Brâncuși. His sculpture of her, "Princess X", created a scandal in 1919 when he represented her or caricatured her as a large gleaming bronze phallus, although he declared this a misunderstanding as he meant the sculpture to suggest her desire and vanity. This sculpture can be seen to symbolize the model's obsession with the penis and her lifelong quest to achieve vaginal orgasm.

Freud 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. 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?'".

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.

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.

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. Lacan, arguing that Freud used "" (lit. 'the It') and "" (lit. 'the I') when he intended the meaning to be "Id" and "Ego", suggested "" be translated "Where It was, there shall I come to be". Bonaparte translated it into French as , meaning in English roughly "Ego must dislodge Id", which according to Lacan is directly contrary to Freud's intended meaning.

Death

Bonaparte died of leukemia in Saint-Tropez on 21 September 1962. She was cremated in Marseille, and her ashes were interred adjacent to Prince George's tomb at Tatoï, near Athens. 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

Foreign House of Hohenzollern: Dame of the Imperial and Royal Decoration of the Cross of Merit Recipient of the Queen Elizabeth II Coronation Medal

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