Parigi, 1928. In her house in Saint-Cloud, a gentlewoman sits in the garden on a deck chair behind a sofa, on which another woman is lying. They talkbut it’s not just any talk. I am a patient and her analystwho listens to her while she is busy crocheting.
Psychoanalysis was still a young science in those years, but this image is enough to make us understand that the analyst had to be an original type. More than for money, he worked for the love of discipline. To the point of having his driver take his patients. And when he left his house in Paris to move to his holiday home in Saint Tropez, he hosted some of them to continue the analysis.
This bizarre tricoteuse is actually one of the key figures in the history of psychoanalysis. Marie Bonaparte she was Sigmund Freud’s favorite student. The last Bonaparte, as she herself defined herself in one of her writings, was also Royal Highness thanks to her marriage to Prince George of Greece and Denmark, and through him related to the most prominent monarchies of Europe. A rich girl, with an iron will and the desire to pursue a profession inappropriate at the time for a lady of her rank. His life, reconstructed by his biographer Célia Bertin in Marie Bonaparte. The princess of psychoanalysis (published by Odoya), is as compelling as a novel. A restless soul of the twentieth centurywith a life dotted with joyful moments as a privileged person but also with flashes of unhappiness.
Marie Bonaparte (1882-1962) in her home in Paris in 1956. On the wall, a portrait of her teacher Sigmund Freud. Her story was reconstructed by Célia Bertin in Marie Bonaparte. The princess of psychoanalysis (Odoya). (Photo by: Photo12/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
The distant father, the grandmother a real stepmother
Marie was born on 2 July 1882. The blood of the great Corsican leader flows in his veins: his great-grandfather Luciano was Napoleon’s brother. Pietro Napoleone, his scion with a turbulent life, had married the daughter of a worker, Nina, who had put up with him in order to enjoy a social rise, ending up projecting all his ambitions onto his only son, Roland. It is she who decides on Roland’s marriage to a rich heiress, Marie Félix Blanc, daughter of the owner of the Monte Carlo Casino. The young woman becomes pregnant but dies at just 22 years old, one month after giving birth to a baby girl. The little orphan is the universal heir of her mother’s riches.
«My old grandmother wasn’t interested in children» wrote Marie, who was entrusted to wet nurses and nannies. The father is busy with his studies, while the grandmother, a true manipulator, is only interested in exercising her power over her son. Marie’s childhood is a constant struggle to get her parent’s attention in vain. “It appears that most of the time you were uncomfortable with her daughter,” Bertin writes. «Ineluctably, she reminded him of her wife, who was so little loved by him». The grandmother, who could have been an emotional refuge, is instead a true stepmother: in her commoner mind, to become an aristocrat the granddaughter must know how to be alone. As she is condemned to a childhood and then to an adolescence without contact with peers and managed by strict governesses. Growing up, Marie blames her being a woman if no one appreciates her intelligence. She sees herself as ugly and like all teenagers she is in love with love.
The trap is sprung right within the home and has the physiognomy of Antoine Leandri, 38 years old, his father’s Corsican secretary. Together with his wife Angela, he plagiarizes her and asks for 100 thousand francs so as not to divulge the love letters that the girl wrote to him. The story is resolved when Marie is now 21 years old with the payment of the ransom, the return of the epistles and a bitter disappointment that the young woman will carry with her for the rest of her life.
Meanwhile the ugly duckling has transformed into a pretty heiress, whose worry is not having the diploma that would allow her to achieve his dream: to study medicine. Even without the support of his mother who has since passed away, Roland Bonaparte remains convinced that studies are of no use to a woman. For a princess like her daughter, the right husband is needed. Nothing better than the son of a Romanov king and grand duchess: George of Greece and Denmark, an officer with light eyes, a little bald but good looking. He courts her discreetly and Marie agrees to marry him. On 12 December 1907 in Athens the wedding took place with the Greek Orthodox rite.
It could be the beginning of a fairy tale, with a young woman who finally receives from her husband the love that her father denied her. Instead, a new existential page opens, no less complicated. «We were of different races. Not only for the color of the hair, but also for the resonances of the mind and the heart”, she would later write.
A facade wedding
Giorgio does not shirk his marital duties, so much so that already a year after the wedding Pietro (1908-1980) was born, followed by Eugenia (1910-1989), but the princess – however inexperienced – understands that there is something wrong with that husband who is so cold and reluctant to any affectionate gesture. The solution to the mystery is before her eyes. His name is Valdemar, he is her husband’s uncle, only ten years older than him, and her best friend. George spends every summer at his castle in Bernstorff, Denmark, and little by little Marie grasps the truth: Giorgio has been in love with his uncle since he was 14 years old. Obviously Valdemar also has a wife, resigned to their relationship, and children.
Marie, who in the meantime has adapted to her new role as mother and royal princess, with endless trips and official commitments, forever archives her desire for love towards her husband: they will live parallel lives, meeting only at times, and Giorgio will agree to meet and occasionally hang out with some of Marie’s lovers. For half a century, until his death, they will officially remain a couple and together they will face critical momentsfrom Giorgio’s disagreements with the son Pietro for his marriage to Irene, a divorced Russianinto exile in South Africa in 1941, when the Nazis spread across Europe. But Marie will look for love elsewhere. «In the period between my 30s and 50s, I had two partners. The first (…) could have been my father; no one has ever loved me as much as he does. The second was like an older brother, and he is the one I loved the most and the longest” writes Bonaparte.
While the clouds that will lead to the First World War are gathering over Europe, the princess meets the French politician Aristide Briand, eleven times prime minister, who offers her his love for five years. And when the story with him ends, X enters Marie’s life, married and a famous doctor, whose name she will never reveal.
The understanding between the elderly master and the “prinzessin”
Paris, 1938. From left, Anna Freud, Marie Bonaparte, Anna’s father Sigmund Freud, and finally Prince Peter of Greece, Marie’s son. (Photo by Pictorial Parade/Getty Images)
The freedom it enjoys allows for Bonaparte to dedicate himself to writing and to approach psychoanalysis. «The first time he read Freud he had a kind of revelation» says Bertin. Her economic status allowed her to satisfy her every desire. Including being received by Sigmund Freud in Vienna and starting the analysis with him. The understanding between the elderly master and the “prinzessin” is immediate: she reciprocates his esteem with an absolute devotion that will make her the vestal of Freudian orthodoxy during the years in which the new discipline settled, the practice and preparation of analysts was discussed, and psychoanalysis institutes were created.
Marie writes, translates, frequents the Freud family. She is an often absent mother at this stage of her life, but she is finally getting what she wanted: to become an analyst. As loyal as she is to the master’s ideas, she does her own thing when he decides to have surgery to cure the frigidity that afflicts him: the goal is to bring the clitoris closer to the vagina. She will not be satisfied with a single intervention, but will try several times, but without success. Subsequently, the studies of Masters and Johnson will prove the error of the frigidity surgery advocated by Marie. Bonaparte, however, remains credited with having brought to the fore a still taboo topic in one of her articles from 1924: the equal right of women to pleasure.
The princess was 57 years old when she became grandmother of Tatiana, daughter of Eugenia, who would later have two other children, Porgie and Carlo Alessandro. He is still a force of nature, and will be until the end, without sparing himself passionate battles, like the defense of the American criminal Caryl Chessman, who will see it on the front line at the age of 78 against the death penalty. Or the war with the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, his bitter enemy. Marie traveled the globe in years when travel was more complicated and he nurtured a constant and profound curiosity for knowledgewhich pushed her to meet excellent minds, such as the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre or the Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf.
The Princess of Greece and Denmark, aunt of Philip of England, succumbed to leukemia at the age of 80 on 21 September 1962, remaining convinced until the end that Mother Nature had endowed her with an almost male mind. She was a woman of her time, conditioned by the stereotypes of her youth. And even her vision of female pleasure remains anchored to that of her master. 60 years after her death, neuroscience has opened up new horizons, in which the brain and sexuality of women no longer have anything to envy of men.
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