Princess Marie Bonaparte (1882 -- 1962) | NCP-LA

Princess Marie Bonaparte known as Princess Georg of Greece and Denmark upon her marriage, was a French author and psychoanalyst, closely linked with Sigmund Freud. Her wealth contributed  to the popularity of psychoanalysis and enabled Freud's escape from Nazi Germany.

On 21 November 1907 in Paris, Marie and Prince George of Greece and Denmark were married in civil ceremony with a subsequent Greek Orthodox ceremony on 12 December 1907 in Athens. Thereafter she was known as Princess Marie of Greece and Denmark.

Despite whas she described as sexual dysfunction, Marie Bonaparte conducted affair  with Freud's disciple Rudolph Loewenstein as well as Braund, French Prime Ministear and with her husband's aid-de-camp Lembessiss,  then with a prominent married French physician and possibly others. Troubled by her difficulty in achieving sexual fulfilment, Marie engaged in research. In 1924, she published  her results under  the pseudonym A.E. Narjani and presented  her theory of frigidity in the medical journal Bruxelles-Medical. Having measured the distance between the clitoris and the vagina in 243 women, she concluded after analyzing their sexual history that the distance between these two organs was critical  for the ability to reach orgasm. She identified women with a short distance, the "paraclitoriedeness" who reached orgasm easily during intercourse and women with a distance of of more than two and a half centimeters, the "teleclitoridieness who had difficulties while the mesoclitorienness were in between.

In 1925, Marie consulted Freud for treatment of what she described as frigidity which was later explained as a failure to have orgasm during missionary position intercourse.

Although Prince George maintained friendly relations with Freud, in 1925 he asked Marie to give up her work in psychoanlytical studies and tretment to devote herself to their family life, but she declined.

Marie Bonaparatae was instumental in delaying  the search of Freud's apartment in Vienna by the Gestapo and later arranged for Freud to smuggle abroad some of his savings in a Greek diplomatic pouch. She persuaded Anton Sauerwald, a German official, to sign the papers enabling Freud to leave Vienna and also arranged for the transport to England of his books, collection of documents and analytic couch.