Marie Bonaparte - Sigmund Freud, Correspondance Intégrale: 1925-1939 (Marie Bonaparte - Sigmund Freud, Complete Correspondance: 1925-1939). Edited by Rémy Amouroux. Translated by Olivier Mannoni. Paris:  Flammarion, 2022,  1084 pp., $38.58 paperback.

We are extremely fortunate to be able to study a recently discovered trove1 of correspondence between Sigmund Freud and Marie Bonaparte, a princess of Greek origin so proud of her connection with the great Napoleon. Reviewing the correspondence of almost 1,000 pages between 1925 and 1939 gives us a window into the personalities of two fascinating individuals, in the early stages of psychoanalysis and during the deteriorating situation in Europe before World War II. This correspondence brings us back to the birth of the French psychoanalytic movement, which was heavily dependent on the influence of Marie Bonaparte.

This book also gives us continuing insight into how Freud managed a relationship with one of his analysands, being quite comfortable in separating his analytic work from his deepening personal involvement. The two aspects of the relationship, in his view at the time, were clearly split off from each other, with no leakage in any direction. Marie openly considered Freud a substitute for her beloved father, who had passed away two years before, and she had no difficulty in addressing Freud as “Mon Cher Père” (My Dear Father).

In this exchange of letters over fourteen years, one can identify evolving stages in the relationship between Bonaparte and Freud: first student to idealized professor, then analysand to analyst, then developing friendship, then relation between two equal participants, then complex

involvement in the profession, finally helper and maternal caring and love. Each stage can be looked at analytically as having complex conscious, preconscious, and unconscious components with evolving transference and countertransference effects complicated by a variety of enactments