QI The Book of the Dead

father, Prince Roland, that she wanted to train as a doctor, but he forbade it as an unseemly choice for an aristocratic woman. However, he permitted her to keep a human skeleton in her bedroom, so that she could study anatomy. This gave her nightmares, transforming in her dreams into a Hindu mummy that attacked her. Marie decided that the skeleton was a subconscious symbol for her dead mother, andthat she must keep it in her room to force herself to conquer her terrors. Her neuroses multiplied: she had her bedroom curtains removed in case they harboured germs, and would not light a fire in case it sucked all the oxygen from the house.
    Forbidden to become a doctor, and fascinated by her inability to enjoy sex, Princess Marie formed the idea that she would become an expert on frigidity. Her father was bedridden for months before his death, and Marie sat with him, quietly reading books on psychology. Freud’s works particularly inspired her and in 1924 she went to Vienna to be analysed by the master, prior to becoming a psychoanalyst herself.
    Freud had plenty of material to work with. Marie’s mother had died when she was a tiny baby and her childhood was lonely. Brought up by servants, she was kept away from other children because her grandmother, Princess Bonaparte, thought that having too many friends was common. Marie developed a range of phobias (including an irrational fear of buttons) and an unhealthy interest in reading anything she could about gruesome crimes, especially articles about Jack the Ripper’s victims and anarchists executing people with bombs. Her earliest memory of sexual pleasure was when her nursemaid sat her astride her foot and bounced her vigorously up and down but, as she explained to Freud, such pleasure eluded her as an adult. She wondered if this might have been caused by a repressed memory of her nursemaid having sex with a groom, but Freud suggested she was a lesbian, and that matters had been made worse because her husband was probably a homosexual. Marie became obsessed about her sexuality and even sought out the groom and asked him if it was possible that he had had sex in her presence when she was a small child. He confessed that it was.

    In 1926, supposedly now sane, Marie co-founded the Société Psychoanalytique de Paris and started taking on her own patients. She had unusual methods. She crocheted while she listened, analysed her patients in the garden, and sent splendid, chauffeur-driven cars to collect them. Sometimes she would take patients away with her when she went on holiday to Athens or Saint-Tropez. As a child, men in the Bois de Boulogne had frightened Marie by exposing themselves to her. Confronting her fears, she returned to the scene of the trauma on a regular basis. When a man did flash her, she would walk up to him, give him her card, and say, ‘Put that away, I’m not interested! But please come and see me tomorrow, I would like to talk to you.’ When a senior Parisian academic came to her for analysis, she told him that his daughter’s phobia of touching the soap in the bath was related to her wish to massage his testicles. The professor was appalled and fled the room in horror, with Marie chasing him down the corridor, shouting, ‘But you cannot behave this way.’
    One of Marie Bonaparte’s few practical achievements was to recruit 243 women and measure the distance between their clitoris and their vagina, concluding that if they were too far apart it would be impossible to achieve orgasm. Marie’s own anatomy convinced her that this was her problem too, and she volunteered to have surgery to move her clitoris closer to her vagina. When it didn’t have any effect, she had it done again, but there was still no improvement.
    Marie Bonaparte’s association with Sigmund Freud developed into a close friendship and when he fled Austria for England she gave him financial assistance. They also collaborated professionally, and she respected his controversial belief that vaginal orgasms were superior and more natural than those involving theclitoris. She confessed to him that she had been tempted to commit incest with her son Peter, and took Freud’s advice not to try it. When she visited a rival analyst – with whom she also had an affair – she immediately confessed her ‘analytic infidelity’ to Freud, and (when he gave his permission) she felt so guilty that she vomited. Marie and Freud shared a love of dogs, and she gave him a Chow as a present.