Marie Bonaparte, Sigmund Freud, Complete Correspondence 1925-1939, edition established and annotated by Rémy Amoureux, translated from German by Olivier Mannoni. Paris, Flammarion, October 2022, 1084 p.; bibliography, index, color and black and white illustrations.

"Why is such a long preparation necessary to get used to this perfect rigor, which, it seems, should naturally impose itself on all good minds? This is a logical and psychological problem well worthy of being meditated upon." Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis 1.

In the surrealist investigation on suicide, Maxime Alexandre fulminates against Moses, Jesus and Henri Poincaré – in that order! – who manufactured the world in which we live (La Révolution surréaliste, no. 2, 1925, p. 11). Freud's ultimate work, Moses and Monotheism, which he set aside, fearing to dethrone a great man from the Judaic pantheon, before being published, all freedom regained in 1939, troubles him like "an unexorcised spirit" (Moses..., chap. Recapitulation, P.U.F. ed., p. 108). Freud uses the same term in a letter to Marie Bonaparte (1882-1962), Princess of Greece and Denmark, great-grandniece of Emperor Napoleon, promising her a joint work to "rid her of specters" around the psychoanalytic analysis of Edgar Allan Poe on which she toils until 1933. "This will be very interesting," adds Freud, unshakeable (13-IX-1926). The only part of literature that attracts the princess is precisely "ghostly literature" (17-V-1926), and it is in vain that Freud advises her, on 21-V-1926: "read nothing terrifying that might reproduce anxiety" (p. 86). She clasps Freud's paternal hand: "for I need you to protect me when I read his horrible stories," she writes on 9-IX-1926. Freud agreed to treat the princess suffering from frigidity in psychoanalytic cure (an obsessive neurosis, says René Laforgue's introductory letter). The latter, married to a homosexual (Georges of Greece), lies naked with her lovers: "as if I were a mummy, in the sarcophagus" (3-VII-1927). Her phobic idea of copulation as "virile aggression" (28-XII-1934), stems from her fear of penetration; and Freud analyzes the passive turn in her letter of 17-XI-1934, not merely as a language error incapable of thinking the thing (Freud's letter, Christmas 1934, p. 793). She therefore finds her virtual accomplice in the American writer who was sexually impotent – except in his fantasies with dead women. M. B. quotes to Freud the study by J. Krutch, which enlightened her on the question – E. A. Poe: A Study of Genius, from 1926. Perhaps we should accept the term "Poe fixated" that the prose writer Léon Baranger (1877-1943) used in the surrealist investigation on suicide (La Révolution surréaliste, no.2, 1925, p. 10), this Poe that Robert Desnos classified in the register of "mortuary decomposition" (LRS no. 7, 1926, chronicle entitled after Poe, "The Strange Case of Mr. Waldemar", p. 32)... But Marie Bonaparte assimilates Freud's work, productively, starting from Das Unheimliche: "I have read The Uncanny; regarding Poe this is marvelous!", she exclaims (24-IX-1926). Let us advance the hypothesis of Poe as one of the common points of agreement between the surrealists and Marie Bonaparte's phantasmagorical universe.

Rémy Amoureux who consulted her papers that she deposited in the United States at the Library of Congress in Washington, brings in his Introduction (p. xii), the positive echo that Marie Bonaparte's study on Poe had in her time – "to bring her to exchange with writers like Antonin Artaud, André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Maurice Sachs or even Stefan Zweig."

More than nine hundred letters from the Freud-Marie Bonaparte correspondence span between 1925, – when Freud accepted her in psychoanalytic cure – and 1939, a year after the Nazis entered Vienna. Despite his political inertia (he deludes himself that one can avoid the "barbaric" Nazis, on 8-IV and 22-VI-1933, p. 721 and 735; then declares himself ready to support "Austrian-style fascism", on 19-II-1934, p. 767), Freud was forced to go into exile with his family in England, to London, thanks to the help of his patient and the American ambassador Bullit. The exorcism of political specters (the appalling racial prejudices, as caught up by Nazism), and unhealthy spirits in the arts (in Leonardo da Vinci, whose study by Freud is translated and annotated by Marie Bonaparte; then Poe, Céline, Proust and even an enigmatic surrealist writer), documents the rigor with which Freud conducts the psychoanalytic cure, as well as on the history of psychoanalysis in short.

This exchange between Freud and the suffering princess is first and foremost a formidable lesson in psychoanalytic treatment. A little more than a third of the Complete Correspondence, presented for the first time in French by Rémy Amoureux at Flammarion editions, in a large illustrated book of more than a thousand pages, belongs to Freud who, with stoic patience endures all the "rejection movements" on the part of the princess (10-V-1926). For thirteen-fourteen years, Freud tries to explain to her that the symptoms of her neurosis cannot be eradicated by yet another operation on the sex nor by her compulsive liaisons, but by work in the head... Everything else is, for him, only "amateurism" (19-I-1935). This amateurism is read in the two-thirds of the Correspondence that belong to Marie Bonaparte... The princess insists that surgery is the only possible path to sexual orgasm. It is in pure waste of time that Freud hammers at her to displace "the sexual towards the intellectual" (2-VIII-1932). He seems to conclude, and this from the beginnings of the cure, on 23-XII-1925, "that [these] experiences are denied to her"... This fateful year of 1925 also sees the young Maryse Choisy (1903-1979), come for analysis to Berggasse 19, then take a long pause, appalled by Freud's intuitions which – exactly as in M. B.'s case –, concern the patient's childhood (M. Choisy, Memoirs, Mont Blanc ed., 1971). The future director of the journal Psyché (1949-1959), will also be M.B.'s great rival in France... For her part, M. B. often abuses her cure: during a visit to Freud on vacation, she is capable of keeping him for five whole hours. Freud complains bitterly about it, post festum (letter of 21-V-1927, p. 236). So, she laconically promises him not to "torment him with frigidity" anymore (17-XII-1931, p. 604)...

Apart from the interest that the General Correspondence holds for private data especially for Marie Bonaparte, then for Freud (his conduct of an analysis, in parallel with his tenacious work on Moses and, with Bullit, between 1930 and 1932, on the "psychological portrait": President Thomas Woodrow Wilson; the affair with the sale of his Intimate Correspondence with Fliess from the years 1887-1904), is added the history of international psychoanalysis – in Austria, Germany and Switzerland, then in France, with the SPP. Despite all her amateurism as an analysand, Marie Bonaparte has the immense merit of having popularized Freud's teaching in France: she was one of the driving forces of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, and of the accompanying journal. A good part of the Complete Correspondence exposes the hesitations regarding the translation of Freud's fundamental topic: to make the "Es" pass, M. B. and many others, for years are for "Soi" – against the Ça, that Edouard Pichon proposes. The character of Dr. A. Louis-Marie Hesnard (1886-1969), the other founding member of the SPF (in opposition to Marie Bonaparte's cultural conceptions), is forgotten in the notices of this edition. André Breton was one of the readers who discovered Freud's psychoanalysis through Dr. Emmanuel Régis's Précis de psychiatrie, and La Psychoanalyse that Régis published, in collaboration with Dr. Hesnard, at Alcan, in (Die Frage der Laienanalyse, 1926), by Marie Bonaparte, in La Révolution surréaliste, no.9-10, October 1927 (illustrated by reproductions of De Chirico, Tanguy and two "exquisite corpses", p. 25-32) is no less ignored. Freud's text, translated under the title: "The Question of Analysis by Non-Physicians", is published with the precision: "extract from the book to appear under this title at the N.R.F.". However, this publication has left no trace in the Complete Correspondence, no more than in the Freud bibliography in French (cf. p. 102). The reason is quite simple: before her long journey to a psychoanalysis congress, Marie Bonaparte writes a letter to Freud on August 10, 1927, sees him personally in Vienna, and their correspondence only resumes at the princess's return to Paris, in winter 1927. – The LRS no. 9-10 had appeared in the meantime.

André Breton who had been in personal relation with Freud since 1921, published in 1938 an appeal for Freud's protection in Trajectory of the Dream. The year 1938 is also that of the cessation of activity of the Parisian surrealist gallery "Gradiva" (1937), named thus in homage to the psychoanalytic study that Freud exercised in 1907 on Wilhelm Jensen's novella. One of the discoveries that we make in the notes arranged by Rémy Amoureux in his presentation of the Complete Correspondence is that the writer Georges Sadoul collaborated, with Marie Bonaparte and E. Zak, on the translation of the text of Jensen's novella, published for the first time in 1931 (n. p. 437). From the "Documents bleus" series at Gallimard, this translation will be reissued after the War in 1949, coll. "Les essais", and in 1971, coll. "Idées". Cécile Marcoux, director of the Sigmund Freud Library in Paris which preserves a large part of M. Bonaparte's legacy, has integrated this fact into her bibliography: Freud in French (ed. Paris Psychoanalytic Society, 2012, p. 32).

Obviously, in these notices, we must recognize the surrealist Georges Sadoul (1904-1969), who collaborates at the time with Le Surréalisme au service de la Révolution. Yet, his collaboration on the translation of Jensen's novella has not been noticed in the General Dictionary of Surrealism under the direction of Biro and Passeron (P.U.F., 1982). The two notices, first that on Jensen's "Gradiva", then that on Sadoul himself, ignore this fact. On the one hand, Gérard Legrand attributes the translation of Jensen's text to M. Bonaparte alone (a. Gradiva", by Gérard Legrand; Dictionary..., p. 188), and on the other hand, Sadoul is presented solely as a fomenter of the surrealist political scandals of 1929, and subsequently a film historian (G. A. Tiberghien, a. Georges Sadoul", id., 373).

The question of a young writer that Marie Bonaparte apostrophizes in her letter to Freud, a year before her collaboration with LRS, remains however unresolved:

"I have read the book of the young French poet, which I enclose: he would have done better to remain a doctor, and to content himself, as such, with treating head colds." (Saint-Cloud, 27-II-1926.) –

Rémy Amoureux notes at the bottom of this p. 25 of the Correspondence: this young writer "could not be formally identified." Is it the fact that Breton later exchanged with Marie Bonaparte about the study on Poe (in 1933...), that made the editor advance his name here? But contrary to what the editor of the Correspondence thinks, it could not be André Breton who published the Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924. For, as we have shown in presenting an autograph letter from Freud to Breton from 1924, Breton's book travels to Berggasse 19 as soon as it comes out (cf. "Freud and the surrealists, his 'integral madmen'", Topique, Revue freudienne, 2/2011). – Consequently, Freud did not wait for M. Bonaparte's criticism in 1927, to read Breton as early as 1924!

We must therefore look for another candidate. The young writer of M. B.'s letter, would it not be Louis Aragon? The author of his own surrealist manifesto, A Wave of Dreams, in the journal Commerce 1925, posted Freud's portrait, with those of Raymond Roussel, De Chirico, Pierre Reverdy..., among "the Presidents of the Republic of the Dream." It is precisely around the republican notion that Aragon declares in his polemic with Drieu La Rochelle: "it might not be Parisian the word Republic that you reproach me for...", but, he concludes: "Freud is not Parisian either" (personal letter to Drieu, N.R.F., 1-IX-1925). The other references are not lacking to incite thinking of Aragon. A former medical student, he had just published his collection Le Mouvement perpétuel (N.R.F. editions) in 1925... And when times change to social criticism of psychoanalysis, returning from the USSR, after the Writers' Congress in Kharkov, Aragon and Georges Sadoul will sign the tract in December 1930, where they will deplore that

"certain disciples of Freud and perhaps (like Hegel at the end of his life, drawing from his own method sociological conclusions that betray only the old age of a man) nowadays Freud himself believe they can make psychoanalysis serve considerations that come to reinforce bourgeois society..." (To Revolutionary Intellectuals).

With the same esteem that Aragon towards "the Artistic Technique..." spoke of Edgar A. Poe – "Regarding the Chirico Exhibition" (LRS, no. 4, 1925, p. 31), André Breton quoted Poe's Marginalia ("Surrealism and Painting", LRS no. 9-10, 1927, p. 43). But, at the time of Hegelianism, the Second Surrealist Manifesto proposes to spit, "in passing, on Edgar Poe." (LRS, no. 12, 1929, p. 2)... Breton's somatic act is still too passionate, if not anachronistic – late revolt, as against Rimbaud and Baudelaire, who proposed a "prayer" to Poe.

Even before the entry of Freudian Marxism, the princess had reasons to fear this social criticism from the surrealists – from Aragon as from Breton, from Artaud as from Sadoul! – The Wilhelm Reich affair, then Souvarine, that she discusses with Freud, proves it too well – before Freud explodes in a letter reproaching in detail the social and cultural privileges of which the princess boasts.

Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), interested in sexological research in social antagonisms, drew closer to communism. Consequently, Freud calls him "Dr. Reich, the furious..." (1-II-1928). He is very suspect in the journal Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse. "Reich has led a shameless attempt to contaminate our journal with bolshevik propaganda," Freud writes again, on 17-I-1932. And in M. B.'s eyes, the leftist orientation of the journal directed by Boris Souvarine, La critique sociale, threatened the publication of Freud in this journal (2-II-1932, p. 619); but Freud lets it happen. He who declares that Americans are good only for giving money, solicits M. B.'s "contribution" for the costs of the publication of the German translation of his study on E. A. Poe so that it be edited. The financial survival of the private publishing house, Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, is threatened and Freud names his son Martin as director, in 1932. A brief Foreword to the study on Poe, presents the gift given to the princess, in Vienna, on 29-VII-1932 (p. 651-652). This foreword was preceded by a vibrant personal letter (7-XI-1931, p. 593), more detailed. All ashamed, Freud must remind M. B. that "the distinction between the phallic phase and the properly genital phase" is not from Karl Abraham, but from him, Freud (The Infantile Genital Organization, dates from 1923). This letter of 1931, gives all its weight to Freud's ultimately positive judgment in the Correspondence with Marie Bonaparte and her personal work on Poe's psychobiography. "These are not only applications, but a veritable enrichment of psychoanalysis. Even the delicate chapter on drive theory is very successful, the comparison with Baudelaire is quite instructive, the study on the presentation of the Ics. [unconscious – R. Amoureux] in Poe, in connection with that of the dream, is a first attempt in its way, of which I rejoice to have been the pretext, and it seems to me very meritorious." M. B. boasts that 180 copies of the French edition were sold (13-VI-1933). Freud does not seem to be behind with his pride at the release of Moses, sold immediately – and that in German – ten times more, at 1800 copies, in 1939.

The publication of this Correspondence also reveals the border fields between oral and written speech. Marie Bonaparte wants to venerate especially analysts of Jewish origin, but makes a mistake in the case of Eugenia Sokolnicka whom she despises..., until Freud corrects her, telling her that Sokolnicka is of Jewish origin! Sokolnicka (1884-1934), alias "Mme Soproniska" in André Gide's novel The Counterfeiters (who scratched out his analysis with her), is not the only one to have paid the price. She finds herself between the anvil and the enclave – M. B.'s animosity (female jealousy?), and Freud's insinuations at the news of his former patient's suicide – "Polish adventuress...", for whom he has no "sympathy" (15-VIII-1934). On the other hand, M. B. is capable of leading a sexual adventure to "avenge" herself of Freud's Semitism!... Among other problematic revelations, transpires the fact that M. B. did not hesitate to take entire passages from Freud's letters – for example the questions of sublimation and repression, in her edifying letter that he called his "conference" in private (27-V-1937). – However, without warning the reader, in her article in the Revue française de psychanalyse, then in the 1934 book, M. B. appropriates Freud's words, which provokes an equivocation, as Rémy Amoureux notes (p. 925n).

Would these not be the reasons to read with the reserve with which Jacques Lacan read a contemporary work on instincts from the 1950s, that the author (unnamed), "approaches through Marie Bonaparte's work..."? Lacan noted that one cites Marie Bonaparte's Introduction to the Theory of Instincts 2, "incessantly as an equivalent of the Freudian text and this without anything warning the reader..." If it is Maurice Bouvet (M. B.'s analyst, as of Maryse Choisy, who will write on "a flow of instinctual energy..."), this will prove that the author (still unnamed in Lacan's mockery), "sees nothing at the true level of second hand." Cf. "Function and Field of Speech and Language", 1953, in Écrits, p. 246-247.

We have concentrated our article on the questions around Freud's presence in the surrealist work, up to the ephemerides, where the journals La Révolution surréaliste and Commerce can appear. After the Breton controversy (it is rather another young poet and former medical student, L. Aragon, the target of M. B.'s criticism, on 27-II-1926), then G. Sadoul, let us add four-five other complementary pieces of information as minimal notices, useful for understanding the lacunary places in this editio princeps (e.g., the forgetting of a notice on Hesnard), otherwise excellent in everything and for everything.

Freud cites the mathematician Poincaré. – "I have read the proofs. The exact title of Poincaré's book that you cite is Science and Hypothesis", M. B. emphasizes in her letter to Freud, on 13-VIII-1926 (p. 131). The editorial notice of this Complete Correspondence specifies that Henri Poincaré's work is from 1898. (The 2nd ed. of 1907, incorporates an article from 1906). But the most important remains to be found: where Freud cites it.

Vinogradov: Russian psychoanalyst, that M.B. spells in German: "Winogradow (? -?)" (letter from M.B. to Freud, 15-IV-1928, p. 350: Vinogradov heard from Max Eitingon about Anna Freud's Parisian stay). – Among the Russian scientists exiled in Paris, we identify Yuri Vinogradov, close to Bukharin and Pavlov; the latter formulated the famous reflex theory inspired by studies on Freud and Breuer's hysteria (M. Bonaparte attends his conference in Copenhagen; makes his acquaintance on the occasion of the 10th International Psychological Congress; and takes up his expression "dynamic stereotype"; letter of 26-VIII-1932 to Freud, p. 660). See, in Russian, V. Samoïlov, "Y. Vinogradov, Ivan Pavlov and Nikolai Bukharin", Zvezda – "Star", No. 10, 1989, and the study by Alexandre Etkind, translated from Russian (1993): "History of Psychoanalysis in Russia", P.U.F., 1995; chap. 7, notes 44 and 86.

The cousin of Alexander I, King of Yugoslavia p. 911. – Marie Bonaparte writes to Freud from Athens, on 4-IV-1937, on a cruise in the Greek islands: "the Troisier friends [M. B.'s titular lover, Dr. Jean Troisier, and his wife] were also with us, a Yugoslav (King Alexander) was very pleasant..." R. Amoureux's notice corrects this impossibility, for King Alexander I of Yugoslavia was assassinated in 1934, in the attack in Marseille. – However, it is no more possible that "it is one of his children". Petar, son of Alexander Karađorđević, at the time is only fourteen years old. – It is more probable that Marie Bonaparte confuses the king (Freud calls him "Alexander of Serbia"; letter to Zweig, 20-X-1932), with his cousin, Prince-Regent Pavle Karađorđević (Saint Petersburg, 1893 – Paris, 1976). Educated in Switzerland and England, Pavle Karađorđević was a great amateur and collector of fine arts; and, then aged forty-one, he must have shown himself "pleasant".

Freud photographed by Marcel Sternberg at Maresfield Gardens. – After the drawing "Freud at his desk" by Max Pollak (1914), and the two portraits of 1926, then of 1936, by the Viennese Ferdinand Schmutzer, for the second edition of Selbstdarstellung – "Freud in Self-Presentation", and the sculpture by Oscar Neman, Croatian sculptor, S. Dali during his July 1938 visit sketches the ultimate images. It is in August 1938 that, at Zweig's request, Freud accepts that Ivelli makes the sculpture of another bust, and that a photographer takes shots. He speaks of this last session in his letter to Marie Bonaparte, on August 22 (p. 984). – From Freud's Correspondence with Zweig, we know that it is the Austrian photographer Sternberg. Previously, he has "made magnificent portraits of Shaw, Wells, etc., and he would very much like to hang your scalp on his belt..." Which act.

The selective bibliography of the Complete Correspondence p. 1045-1059, cites the two works of Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) about Freud. We must resolutely add the Correspondence 1908-1939 (French trans. 1991, Payot ed.), which goes from the romantic days in Vienna to Zweig's exile, then Freud's in England. Freud calls the writer his compatriot, not without reason, "my friend Stefan Zweig" (letter of 7-IX-1926 to Marie Bonaparte). Zweig was the only one who could have enough personal prestige – and cheek!- to present to Freud, in Vienna, the writers Romain Rolland (14-V-1924) and Jules Romains (March 1927), and to bring him, in London, on July 19, 1938, the surrealist Salvador Dali – "the only genius in the painting of our era" (letter of introduction, 18-VII-1938; Correspondence 1908-1939 of Zweig and Freud). – Zweig is also present in the Complete Correspondence of Freud and Marie Bonaparte, because, like the princess, he foments the Nobel Prize in Literature for Freud (1935). But Freud relegated to oblivion their desire and their "tactical measures", well aware that his own scientific genius does not reside in literature. Should we not look for it rather in the fine sheets of the couches, or of beds – of Beds-and-ratures, as the Dadaist spelled it, and as this Complete Correspondence demonstrates with a princess who displays herself as essentially immodest?