Prince Valdemar, my hero

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I love reading like this: books that delight with plentiful obscure detail and anecdote and require one to constantly look things up; reading that leads to other reading, often in unexpected directions. Who would have expected that a book about Leonardo da Vinci would have led me to Marie Bonaparte, a 20th century psychoanalyst?

In 1907, when she was 25, her father, a prince from the lateral, that is to say, non-dynastic branch of the Bonaparte family, himself an avid botanist,

arranged Maria’s marriage to Prince George of Greece and Denmark, the second son of King George I of the Hellenes.  Prince George was 13 years older than his bride, incredibly tall and handsome.  Marie fell head over heels in love with him, although from the beginning she sensed that they had nothing in common, that while she was happy to listen to her husband, he had absolutely no interest in her or her life.

Marie’s fears proved to be well-founded.  Her husband was emotionallly as well as physically distant, he brooded constantly over his former role as Governor of Crete, and he was a little too attached to his Uncle Waldemar, who he spent every summer with in Denmark. [from the blog Scandalous Women]

The attachment was indeed very special.

When George brought his bride to Denmark for the first visit with his uncle, Prince Valdemar’s wife, Marie d’Orléans, was at pains to explain to Marie Bonaparte the intimacy which united uncle and nephew, so deep that at the end of each of George’s several yearly visits to Bernstorff he would weep, Valdemar would fall sick, and the women learned the patience not to intrude upon their husbands’ private moments. [from the Wikipedia entry]

The attachment was indeed very special. (Ahem).

Very special.

During the first of these visits, Marie Bonaparte and Valdemar found themselves engaging in the kind of passionate intimacies she had looked forward to with her husband who, however, only seemed to enjoy them vicariously, sitting or lying beside his wife and uncle. [from the Wikipedia entry]

(Actually, this seems to me quite nice and cultured and sophisticated. Prince Valdemar might serve as a role model for some).

Marie fell under the spell of Freud and became a psychoanalyst herself. In her defense, it does not take much to become a great psychoanalyst; but she did some rather good science besides:

Marie first consulted Freud in 1925 (she was 43) for treatment of what she described as her frigidity, which was later explained as a failure to have orgasms during missionary position intercourse.

Troubled by her difficulty in achieving sexual fulfillment in this way, 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-Médical. 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 (“volupté”); she identified women with a short distance (the “paraclitoridiennes”) who reached orgasm easily during intercourse, and women with a distance of more than two and a half centimeters (the “téleclitoridiennes”) who had difficulties while the “mesoclitoriennes” were in between. Marie considered herself a “téleclitorienne” and approached Josef Halban to surgically move her clitoris closer to the vagina. She underwent and published the procedure as the Halban-Narjani operation. When it proved unsuccessful in facilitating the sought-after outcome for Marie, the physician repeated the operation. [from the Wikipedia entry]

Sources do not say whether the second surgery was successful; or whether Marie in time came to adopt a greater variety of sexual positions. Though one would imagine Prince Valdemar must have taught her a thing or two.