Biography of Marie Bonaparte

One of the first pioneers of female psychoanalysis

Female sexuality has always been a taboo. Many times it has been classified as a sin and recriminated as an affront. To a free sexuality, add a curious and awake mind, rebellious for a time when a woman’s functions and her privileges were limited, despite having great monetary blessings and an enviable family tree, like what happened to Marie Bonaparte.

With her surname we can already realize to which family she belongs, Marie was the great-niece of Napoleon I and was the political aunt of the current Prince Philip of Edinburgh. She was known for her studies in psychoanalysis and was a friend and student of Sigmund Freud.

The princess who was condemned to sin and marriage

Marie was the daughter of Marie-Felix née Blanc and the French prince Roland Napoleon Bonaparte, and the granddaughter of the entrepreneur and founder of the Monte Carlo Casino, Francois Blanc, with a great fortune. Her life did not start well, her mother died a month after giving birth and she herself almost died as a baby.

Due to her status, she spent a large part of her childhood alone and without the company of other children. Her father, an amateur geographer and anthropologist, left her in the care of her paternal grandmother, to whom she was very fond. fear.

Her desire for knowledge made her interested in science, literature, writing and her own body. One day, while she was masturbating she was caught by one of the women who took care of her: «It’s a sin! It is a vice! If you do that you will die!” she recorded Marie in her diary in 1952.

For 9 years, Marie did not touch herself, fearing that death was the price of pleasure. The princess, she gave all her efforts to study languages ​​such as English and German, she even wanted to present evidence to support her knowledge. Her family prevented her from taking her exams, believing that her family would be humiliated if she failed.

Bonaparte wrote in his diary: “Cursed my name, my rank, my fortune! Damn, especially for my sex! Because if I were a kid, they wouldn’t stop me from trying!”

The beginning of their romance

At only 20 years old, she had an affair with an assistant of her father, the relationship ended with a scandal, blackmail and humiliation only towards Marie. Her father, to mediate her situation, ended up marrying her preferred candidate, a man older than her (13 years old), Prince George of Greece and Denmark.

The couple was married for 50 years and over time Marie realized that her husband’s real interest was her uncle, Valdemar.

We have already mentioned how studious Marie was and in her work she found valuable knowledge for her and for the time. In 1924, she published a work called “Notes on the anatomical causes of frigidity in women” under the pseudonym A. E. Narjani. Bonaparte developed the following theory: A shorter distance between a woman’s clitoris and her vagina increases her likelihood of experiencing an orgasm during penetrative intercourse.

In the 1920s, he came to collect the measurement of more than 240 women in Paris and according to his data at that time he mentioned the following: «the data were not collected systematically, but by chance, when a woman went to see the doctor. This sample of her divided her into three groups according to the distance of her between the meatus and the clitoris, although how this division was made is not described »

Marie was the first to say that women were made differently and therefore would respond differently during intercourse. Her theory relied on female anatomy and did not allow for psychological maturity, something that she would rectify later.

Bonaparte believed that if the woman underwent an operation to close that separation in the genital area, she could have an orgasm during sexual intercourse with penetration. However, everything was wrong and the only thing she ended up doing was severing nerves in an important area; Marie underwent the surgery three times.

Sigmund Freud’s savior

The frustrations caused by her frigidity and self-consciousness that she carried with her since her childhood, led her to seek advice from one of the experts in psychoanalysis of the moment: Sigmund Freud. In the psychoanalyst she found a mentor and a friend, the princess she had an interest in psychoanalysis and that is how she began her studies.

Over time, Bonaparte became a psychoanalyst and with the arrival of World War II she saved Freud himself and his family from the clutches of the Nazis.

Marie gained the confidence and knowledge to at some point contradict Freud himself, a relationship with which she remained friendly and scholarly.

Her greatest contradictor: herself

Thanks to her studies and knowledge, Marie rejected all her original ideas and published a book in 1950 called “Female Sexuality”, where she emphasized that the female anatomy has nothing to do with her pleasure, but that it is the psychological aspect that influences her enjoyment. She left a legacy of books and essays, all revolutionary for the time in which she was born.