"Princess Marie Bonaparte - Princess Of Psychoanalysis." Part One

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

"Princess Marie Bonaparte - Princess of Psychoanalysis." Part one

Princess Marie Bonaparte is one of the most prominent women in the history of psychoanalysis.

While we heard about her as the savior of Freud, thanks to her connections and the amount of money contributed, he was able to escape to London from Nazi-occupied Vienna.

Marie Bonaparte has traditionally been assigned an organizational role in the development of psychoanalysis rather than a scientific one, since she was able to protect the psychoanalytic heritage, translate many of Freud's works into French and spread psychoanalytic teachings in France, where they were able to be picked up and continued by many famous analysts, in particular, Jacques Lacan.

Although, Marie herself is also the author of many psychoanalytic works: she was engaged in the study of the problem of female sexuality and sexual satisfaction.

But in addition to this, she still had many merits for psychoanalysis, for this reason, today her interesting personality deserves attention in connection with the widespread dissemination of psychoanalysis.

Princess Marie Bonaparte (fr. Marie Bonaparte July 2, 1882, Saint-Cloud - September 21, 1962, Saint-Tropez) - writer, translator, psychoanalyst, analysand and student of Sigmund Freud, Princess pioneer of psychoanalysis in France.

He is the great-granddaughter of Lucien Bonaparte (brother of the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte) and the granddaughter of Pierre Bonaparte (he was a reveler and often got into trouble, went to prison, secretly married the daughter of a plumber and doorman (Nina, Justine Eleanor Ruffin), she later raised Marie) …

The mother of ten children, Roland Bonaparte (Marie's father) was the 4th son.

And on her guidance, in order to provide an adequate standard of living with her social and financial ambitions, he married the daughter of François Blanc (a successful businessman, incredibly wealthy stock exchange tycoon and owner of several casinos, one of the developers of Monte Carlo), (Marie-Felix Blanc).

Marie Bonaparte was the daughter of Prince Roland Bonaparte (19 May 1858 - 14 April 1924) and Marie-Felix Blanc (1859-1882)

However, a month after birth, her mother died of an embolism (blockage), (it was said that it was a murder planned by her father and grandmother, perhaps it was fantasies and Marie admired what kind of passion she needed to have to do this and blamed herself for such thoughts) and the Princess's childhood passed in Saint-Cloud, then (from 1896 in a family hotel in Paris) under the tyrannical yoke of grandmother Nina (Eleanor Ruffin).

The girl grew up in a real castle, in a house in Monte Carlo, but for her it seemed cold, empty and every night she was haunted by nightmares, she wanted to die. She was looked after by many governesses and her grandmother, she was not even allowed to get sick: too big a jackpot was at stake. Indeed, in the event of her death, all the innumerable dowry, written off to her by an indecently rich grandfather, goes to her maternal relatives.

She was not allowed anything, and least of all - to choose her own destiny. Maria wanted to become a traveler - to cross the steppes, deserts, climb into the jungle, visit the North, study foreign languages … She wanted to be like her father.

In general, we can say that Marie was unhappy since childhood, that she grew up in complete isolation and desperately wanted to be loved by her own father. Her whole life was filled with fears and a sense of her own inferiority.

The relationship between father, grandmother and Marie Bonaparte in childhood was formed hard and alienated. In such an atmosphere, the young girl wrote a number of manuscripts in which she described her situation.

Many years later, she published these childhood fantasies of her own, providing them with her own interpretations, which she was able to create during her psychoanalysis.

Once (trip with sculpture) at the age of 15 while traveling in Italy

The strange sculpture by Lorenzo Bernini "The Ecstasy of St. Teresa" in the Roman church of Santa Maria della Vittoria made an indelible impression on the Princess.

Since then, her dream has not left her to experience the same feelings as the heroine of the sculpture.

And she even knew how to realize these erotic fantasies, for more than once she became a secret witness to love scenes between Uncle Pascal and her wet nurse. It was then on the face of Madame Nico that the expression of voluptuousness appeared on the face of St. Teresa.

In 1907, at the insistence of her father, Marie, at less than 25 years old, married the son of the Greek king Prince George with great hopes: her husband was thirteen years older than her and could play the role of a father in her life, but he turned out to be a homosexual (he satisfied his sexual instincts with his her first intimate experience disappointed her. Marie experienced no longing, no ecstasy (like that statue).

The spouses barely conceived two children, Petros and Eugene: Georg did this with almost clenched teeth, and then hurriedly left the bed - Maria sobbed for a long time.

The relationship between Prince George and her was unusually estranged, both emotionally and physically. Marie Bonaparte met her need for love in a number of extramarital affairs, the most significant of which was the relationship with Aristide Briand, the Prime Minister of France. (Aristide Briand)

It is rumored that for the first time she had an orgasm with her own son. Pierre was her first child and adored his mother; as a teenager, he ran to her bedroom in the morning.

But still, Marie refused to communicate with her son, although not without the help of Dr. Freud. An unexpectedly successful experience with her son transferred Marie's interests to young people: her lovers until her death were men no older than 28 years old. By the way, Marie spent her free time from psychoanalysis and love pleasures in Africa, where she hunted crocodiles.)

From early childhood, Marie wrote a number of monuscripts about her life, she knew several languages and was a very literate girl, had a craving for science.

Marie Bonaparte will describe in 1918 in one of her manuscripts entitled Les homes que j'ai aimés (Men I Loved) the story of how

At the age of sixteen, a Corsican secretary tried to blackmail her, to whom she wrote several love letters. She thought it was love, but it turned out that she just needed Marie's money … (Freud believed that her attitude to her huge frightening state was biased)

1920 "War Wars and Social Wars" (1920, published in 1924) - * Guerres militaires et guerres sociales, Paris

From an early age, she was absorbed by thoughts related to the death of her mother and the reputation of her grandfather, with her death. So, in 1921, she was in the gallery for the public all the time during the trial of Henri Landru, who was married to ten women - and killed them all.

The complexes of the princess herself were associated with both her appearance and her femininity. Most of all, she was saddened by the inability to experience a "normal orgasm."

She is "showered with honors and glory", but thinks that everyone is only interested in her money and suffers from coldness. It is this difficulty that contributes to her first attempts at studying sexuality, about which she speaks openly and harshly.

The unattainable "Ecstasy of St. Teresa" became her obsession.

She began to actively study the problems of female sexuality.

She had already had several plastic surgeries (on the nose and chest) when she met the Viennese gynecologist Josef Halban; they jointly developed a theory that could deceive nature by means of an operation, changing the structure of the genitals to make orgasm available. It was about the transfer of the clitoris, which he called "clitoricathesis."

(By cutting the ligament that attaches the clitoris to the pubic bone, the clitoris can be retracted and the skin around it sutured more tightly. It is worth noting that the exact same incision is made during operations on men to increase the length of the penis)

But it did not help. The joy of orgasm remained unknown. So the reason lay not at all in the field of the anatomical structure, but much deeper … in the psychic.

(Later in 1949, Bonaparte reported five such cases; and we can assume that she wrote about the same five women that Dr. Halban operated on. Princess Marie subsequently conducted studies on women who had clitoridectomy. In one article, she did not hides the "surgical sins" of her youth and humbly admits that her ideas of that time were erroneous, as well as "para-analytic" …)

1923 Marie Bonaparte reads the work of Sigmund Freud "Introduction to Psychoanalysis", which Gustave Le Bon advised her, and begins to take an active interest in this little-known direction at that time. Marie had the opportunity to talk about psychoanalysis with Madame Sokolnitska, a student of Ferenczi and Freud.

Even before her personal analysis in 1924, Marie Bonaparte, under the pseudonym A. E. Nariani, published in the Brussels Medical magazine the results of a study of two hundred women in Paris and Vienna, an article “Notes on the anatomical causes of women's frigidity”. For these studies, Marie met famous Parisian and Viennese gynecologists, formed a group of women who told her about their experiences or problems in the intimate sphere. I conducted research, polls, compared the facts, then measured the distance from the clitoris to the vagina with a ruler in more than 300 women, and if it was more than the width of the thumb, then the woman is not capable of orgasm.

And later, Marie Bonaparte began to prefer phallic women as an object of research. An example of personal experience in this regard was her grandmother, Princess Pierre.

In a number of articles, Marie Bonaparte deals with the problem of the passivity and masochism of women.

In 1924, at the bedside of her dying father, Marie read Freud's "Lectures", due to the death of her father, she falls into depression.

The loss of her father, whom she loved rather ambivalently, prompted her to seek solutions to her problems in psychoanalysis. Marie had the opportunity to talk about psychoanalysis with Madame Sokolnitska, a student of Ferenczi and Freud.

Unconsciously, she was looking for a second father. In the papers left over from her father, Marie discovered five small, black notebooks, which were written by her between the ages of seven and ten. She no longer remembered them, and she did not understand what her childhood fantasies meant. This was also the reason to turn to the analysis.

In 1925, she convinces Laforgue to intercede with Freud to introduce her to psychoanalysis.

Marie was already ready to commit suicide, but she was saved by a meeting with Freud.

And for 15 years the princess became his student, patient, popularizer, savior, translator, publisher.

She convinced Freud to take her as a patient on September 30, 1925. Every year, starting in 1925, she came to Vienna for several months to be analyzed by Freud, who at first somewhat restrainedly accepted her for analysis, since he believed that it was only a fashionable whim of a lady from high society. But pretty soon she became one of the most beloved students of Sigmund Freud.

This psychoanalysis continues until 1938, on the occasion of her more or less long stays (from two to six months) in Austria, since she simultaneously combines her treatment, her social life and her family responsibilities.

This is how Marie Bonaparte creates the tradition of "interrupted psychoanalysis", when the analysand lives in another country and regularly visits his analyst for several weeks. Today, this type of analysis is actively practiced by many psychoanalytic schools in France.

Marie Bonaparte's innovation, now a tradition, was that she became the first practicing psychoanalyst in France without a medical education.

Her psychoanalysis with Freud, her secular and social influence, her frequent travels between Vienna and Paris give her the role of mediator between a group of Parisian psychoanalysts and Freud. She becomes his representative in Paris.

Even before going through her analysis, Marie Bonaparte arranged things so that Rudolf Lövestein, who was trained at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, came to Paris. (he analyzed her son and was Marie's lover, Freud was against this love triangle, because the Princess also had an incestuous relationship with her son Pierre, which she graduated only after analyzing with Freud) He arrived in February 1925 in order to with Laforgue, Madame Sokolnitska and others to found the Parisian Psychoanalytic Society. At this meeting, Marie Bonaparte was in a sense the messenger of Sigmund Freud.

The official opening of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society took place in 1926.

On November 4, 1926, Marie Bonaparte founds the first and by far the most influential psychoanalytic society - the Parisian Psychoanalytic Society. (La Societe Psychanalytique de Paris)

She appoints the first president of the society, René Laforgue.

An ardent supporter of Freud and the analysand of the teacher, she intervenes in the debate of the young society with the authorities. In 1926, in one of her letters to Laforgue, the expression “Freud thinks like me” appears, which will contribute to the fact that in the society of Parisian psychoanalysts HER will be nicknamed “Speaking like Freud! "," Freud would have said the same thing."

She is now translating Freud's most important articles into French and is trying to put an end to the tendency of French psychoanalysts to invent their own French terminology for psychoanalysis. With works in the field of applied psychoanalysis, French psychoanalysts tried to justify psychoanalysis in intellectual France.

Since 1927, she has funded the French Psychoanalytic Journal, where she herself publishes a dozen articles, including translations of Freud's The Future of an Illusion and An Introduction to the Theory of Instincts, which contain a course of his lectures given at the Institute of Psychoanalysis.

She translated into French and published Freud's books with her own money:

"Delirium and dreams in Jensen's Gradiva", "Essays on Applied Psychoanalysis", "Metapsychology" and

Freud's five main clinical cases: Dora (1905), Little Hans (1909), The Man-with-Rat (1909), Schreber (1911) and The Man-With-Wolves (1918) (jointly by Rudolf Levenstein). She translates The Five Types of Psychoanalysis in collaboration with Levenstein.

In 1927 she translated "Memories of the Childhood of Leonardo da Vinci"

"One Early Memory of Leonardo da Vinci"

Freud, where he appears under his own name. This is a scandal for her secular environment, and to such an extent that her husband is trying to force her to break off relations with Freud.

“All I need is a penis and the ability to orgasm!” She said to her husband when he opposed her passion for psychoanalysis and communication with Freud.

In a small work "On the Symbolism of Head Trophies" (1927), she addresses the theme of symbolic functioning in the culture of experiencing the feeling of omnipotence and the fear of castration. Using the material of various ethnographic interpretations, examples from folk psychology, she reveals the origin of the sacred and profane cult of horns, which simultaneously symbolize strength and indicate a man deceived in his strength. Phallic power can result in the experience of loss or castration. These opposite tendencies are absorbed by folk rituals, cults and beliefs. Bonaparte discusses various forms of hunting and obtaining trophies, showing their often symbolic, that is, the meaning of obtaining sacred power, phallic omnipotence, which has lost its utilitarian character.

This text is interesting as another talented contribution to the development of Freudian psychology, which allows us to reveal the nature of our everyday views and actions.

Contents: reviews: Turnover of speech and its history, Heroic horns, Magic horns, Trophies of war, Trophies of the hunt, Ironic horns.

1927 - the work "The Case of Madame Lefebvre" (Le cas de madame Lefebvre).

in which she presented a psychoanalytic study of a female murderer who was bewildered by the sheer senselessness of her act (known as the "Madame Lofèvre case" published in 1927). Disgust and admiration - these two feelings were constantly fighting in Marie's soul.

Clinical case: Murder motivated by maternal jealousy Patient: A woman, 63 years old, killed her daughter-in-law out of jealousy of her own son (delusional threat: that another woman might take him away) and it became easier for her: her hypochondriacal complaints (lowered organs, pain in the liver, "twisted nerves" and even the real diagnosis stopped worrying her (breast cancer from an uncomfortable mattress), in prison her hair turned black, she calmed down as Ms. Lefebvre herself said, her psyche slipped into a state of psychosis, a protective soothing delusional structure (delusion of pretensions - abduction of her son by another woman), resonant insanity, chronic systematized psychosis Key concepts: Hypochondria Paranoia Psychosis Jealousy Resonant madness Murder of the Oedipus complex.

In 1928, Marie Bonaparte, in an article entitled “Identifying a Daughter with Her Dead Mother,” published fragments of her two-year analysis, which she had undergone with Freud.

Marie Bonaparte very clearly describes the great importance that her father had for her throughout her life. It was her father who, when she was nineteen, gave the stories of Edgar Alan Poe to read. But only after passing the analysis with Freud, she was able to really read these stories, since the fear that the mother, who died shortly after her birth, would come to avenge herself, did not allow her to understand them.

In 1933, the book “Edgar Poe. Psychoanalytic Research”, to which Sigmund Freud wrote the foreword. (* Edgar Poe. Étude psychanalytique - avant-propos de Freud).

"In this book, my friend and student Maria Bonaparte shed light of psychoanalysis on the life and work of the great painful artist. Thanks to her interpretation, it is now clear how much the nature of his works is due to his human originality, and it also becomes clear that this very originality was a condensation of strong emotional attachments. -sty and painful experiences of his early youth. Such studies are not obliged to explain the genius of the artist, but they show what motives awakened him and what material fate brought him. Studying the laws of the human psyche is especially attractive on the example of outstanding individuals. "(Freud's foreword).

Marie Bonaparte tried to show that the analysis of literary works can be based on the same mechanisms that are involved in dreams.

She carries out psychoanalysis in her office on the rue Adolphe-Yvon in Paris then in Saint-Cloud, using original methods: she sends her car to go after her clients and return with them, and meets them on a sun lounger for knitting. (Freud thought this was wrong)

Marie Bonaparte took an active part in preserving the heritage of her idol.

Marie discusses letters from Freud and Fliess and their ransom with the military. Soon, hidden homosexuality in the communication of friends will be revealed in them, because Freud wanted to destroy them … But Marie saw scientific value in them and dreamed of preserving them.

In 1934, she buys Freud's correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess for 12,000 (an unbearable sum for Freud), which was put up for auction by the latter's widow. Despite the protests of Freud himself, who wanted to destroy these letters, Marie Bonaparte kept them and published them in the early fifties. Here sources diverge, some say that they remained confiscated from the Nazis.

In parallel, in 1930, he founded the Château de Garche clinic, specializing in the treatment of depression and various psychiatric diseases, occupying an estate owned by the family of Antoine de Saint-Exupery.

It attracts leading psychoanalysts of that time to France - Rudolf Levenstein (future analyst and implacable opponent of Jacques Lacan), Raymond de Saussure, Charles Audier, Henri Flournois - which for many years makes Paris the world center of psychoanalytic thought. At the same time, she pursues her policy quite tough and categorically, having received from her colleagues the nickname "Freud-would-say-the-same-the-most."

Sigmund Freud undoubtedly had a huge influence on Marie Bonaparte. But her services to the teacher can hardly be overestimated.

After the Anschluss of Austria in 1938, Freud managed to leave the Third Reich with his wife and daughter Anna, who had already been interrogated by the Gestapo, thanks to the connections and financial assistance (more than 4 thousand dollars (35,000 of the then currency)) of the eminent student. This enabled the eighty-three-year-old founder of psychoanalysis to die relatively quietly in 1939 in London. (his ashes are kept in an antique Prussian vase, which Mari presented to him) Marie and Anna tried to persuade him to leave for a long time.

However, the attempt to save and move abroad the International Psychoanalytic Publishing House and the library of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society failed.

The Vienna PA society COULD NOT CONTINUE THE WORK, and Zurich was already occupied by Jung - London remained.

In July 1938, while moving to London, Freud stayed for one day at the house of Marie Bonaparte.

Freud used the agonizing waiting time to go abroad to translate, together with Anna Freud, the book "Topsy", in which Marie Bonaparte describes her Chow Chow dog, operated on for cancer, Freud also had a Chow Chow and he presented the puppy to Marie during her analysis in Vienna.

Freud always held the Princess with great respect. It was in a letter to Marie that he dared to admit that he still did not receive an answer to the burning question: “Was will das Weib” (“What do women want?) …

In May 1939, the Institute for Psychoanalysis was closed and the French Psychoanalytic Journal ceased publication.

Continuation of this story shortly in the second part of this article.