Marie Bonaparte
Princess Marie Bonaparte (2 July 1882-21 September 1962) was a psychoanalyst, closely linked with Freud. Her wealth contributed to the popularity of psychoanalysis, and enabled Freud's escape from the Nazis.
Marie Bonaparte was Napoleon Bonaparte's great-grand-niece. She was born at Saint-Cloud, a town in France, the daughter of prince Roland Bonaparte (1859-1924) and his wife Marie-Félix Blanc (1859-1882), herself the daughter of François Blanc, the principal real-estate developer of Monte Carlo. 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 George of Greece. 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?’".
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 Nazis, support of Geza Roheim's anthropological explorations, and preserving Freud's letters to Wilhelm Fleiss 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.
References
- Bertin, Celia, Marie Bonaparte: A Life, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1982. [ISBN 0151572526]
- Loewenstein, Rudolf, Drives, Affects and Behavior: Essays in Honor of Marie Bonaparte, 1952
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
External links
Société Psychanalytique de Paris | Marie Bonaparte