Princess Marie Bonaparte
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Princess Marie Bonaparte (2 July 1882-21 September 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.
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 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).
Marie consulted Sigmund Freud for treatment of her own frigidity, a cure which can be said to have backfired, as she later conducted affairs with Freud's disciple Rudolf Loewenstein, as she had with the Prime Minister of France, Aristide Briand. 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?’".
On 6 February 1952, 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 Francois 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; among her many services to the cause of psychoanalysis were paying Freud's ransom to the authorities of Nazi Germany, support of Geza Roheim's anthropological explorations, and preserving Freud's letters to Wilhelm Fliess despite Freud's wish that they be destroyed. She founded the French Institute of Psychoanalysis (Société Psychanalytique de Paris SPP) in 1915.
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.
Her story of her relationship with Sigmund Freud and how she helped his family escape into exile was made into a movie. Princesse Marie was directed by Benoît Jacquot and starred Catherine Deneuve as Marie Bonaparte, and Heinz Bennent as Sigmund Freud. It came out in 2004.
[edit] References
- 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
[edit] Works
- Topsy - 1940 - a love story about her dog.
- The Life and Works of E. A. Poe - 1949
- Five Copy Books - 1952
- Feminine Sexuality - 1953
