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When, in 1985, I asked the British psychoanalyst, J. C. M. Sym, if she had known Marie Bonaparte, she replied with affection and amusement, “Oh, she was a splendid old thing!” Although I knew Bonaparte only through her writings, I intuitively understood and appreciated the aptness of Sym's characterization. A redoubtable figure, who by turns could be both charming and demanding, self-absorbed and generous, passionately romantic and morbidly realistic, Bonaparte was deeply committed to intellectual pursuits. As we shall see, the poignant and dramatic experiences that shaped her personality also found expression in her psychoanalytic writings, especially her papers on female sexuality.
Today Marie Bonaparte is chiefly remembered for her devotion to Freud's theories and well-being, her financial generosity to the movement, and her role in establishing psychoanalysis in France, while her intellectual contributions are largely neglected. She was, however, a prolific author; among her works are the series of essays gathered in Female Sexuality (1953b), a massive biography, Edgar Allan Poe, A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation (1933), a two-volume autobiography, To the Memory of the Departed (1952b), and detailed commentaries on her childhood writings, Five Copy-Books Written by a Little Girl between the Ages of Seven-and-a-Half and Ten: With Commentaries (1950; 1952a; 1953a).1
Bonaparte's discovery of these enigmatic childhood writings and drawings among the papers of her father, Roland Bonaparte, after his death in 1924 prompted her to seek an analysis with Freud. For several years thereafter, beginning in the autumn of 1925, Bonaparte, now in her forties, traveled to Vienna for the analysis, each time staying several months (1952a, 3:313). She found in Freud what she desperately