Women & Queer Psychoanalysts, No. 9.
Marie Bonaparte (1882–1962), French psychoanalyst, great-grandniece of Napoleon, wife of Prince George of Greece.
She walked into Freud's office with an intensely private problem: she could not reach orgasm. That problem drove her entire career. She published papers under a pseudonym, personally measured the relationship between clitoral position and sexual pleasure in 243 women, and underwent three surgeries in an attempt to alter her own body. Her book Female Sexuality (1951) was one of the first systematic studies of female desire in psychoanalysis.
In 1926, she founded the Paris Psychoanalytic Society. French psychoanalysis began with her. She purchased Freud's private letters from the widow of his friend Fliess. Freud asked her to destroy them. She refused. Those letters remain critical documents in the study of psychoanalytic history.
In March 1938, the Nazis annexed Austria. The Gestapo searched Freud's apartment. Princess Bonaparte used her triple royal status to stall the search, paid the ransom, and smuggled Freud's savings out in a Greek diplomatic pouch. In June, the Freud family boarded the Orient Express out of Vienna, spent one night at her house in Paris, and continued on to London.
Freud said: "She saved my life."
She once said: "If anyone were to write the story of my life, the title should be The Last Bonaparte."