Marie Bonaparte's “Man and Dentist”: Introduction

Signs mislead, from “Painless Dentistry” upwards.

My reason for translating and introducing Marie Bonaparte's “Man and Dentist” essay is as narcissistic as it is simple. Not long ago, I was the recipient of two root canals, and I was struck by how psychoanalytically relevant the experience was. Inspired by Theodor Reik's autobiographical style, let me recount the moment I decided, before I had even read this essay, to translate it. I received the root canals simultaneously, one on my left front tooth, the other on my left canine, to stave off an abscess that remains a mystery, as I have never had a cavity or gum disease. The root canal procedure is a relatively simple one, albeit extremely uncomfortable; a drill is used to open the central cavity of a dead tooth, the pulp is removed, and the pulp is replaced, usually with an organic compound named gutta-percha, harvested from a tree in Malaysia or Borneo that is, according the to International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, “near threatened.”

Simple though it be, the operation is a profound bodily invasion and highly destructive to ideas of clear interior/exterior boundaries between self and world. Despite all this, psychoanalytical approaches to teeth are few and far between. The early American psychoanalyst Isador Coriat (1946) has a short piece about the fear of going to the dentist (published originally in these pages), and there is this essay by Marie Bonaparte.

In my experience, Marie Bonaparte is seen somewhat on the edges of psychoanalysis, despite her centrality to the enterprise. She provided copious funds to allow psychoanalysis to flourish, bribed Nazi officials to allow the Freuds (and other analysts) to flee, and was a theorist and analyst herself. Yet, there is a certain feeling that she is marginalized in psychoanalysis much as she was during childhood, where she was viewed as little more than an