DIVERSITY IN SCIENCE: MARIE BONAPARTE (1882-1962) AND THE PARISIAN SOCIETY OF PSYCHOANALYSIS
Lindsay Wilson, Ph. D.
Northern Arizona University
Department of History
In September 2006, an expert panel convened by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences reported that "Women in science and engineering are hindered not by lack of ability but by bias and outmoded institutional structures in academia" and went on to say that "in an era of global competition the nation could not afford such under-use of precious human capital." Although some might consider the panel's statement to be self-evident, it heralds an important milestone in a long history of debate about women's roles in science.
The controversy about women's capacity for scientific genius did not originate in the U.S., but has deep roots in European thought and culture. It is reflected in titles of works like Sir Francis Galton's English Men of Science: Their Nature and Nurture (1874) and Roy Porter's Man Masters Nature: Twenty-Five Centuries of Science (1988) that stand in contrast to Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's more recent Subject to Biography: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Writing Women's Lives (1998). Rather than identifying scientific genius with lone intellectuals, Young-Bruehl proposed different criteria for gauging scientific genius, suggesting that originality might equally be the product of collective enterprises.
I propose examining the contributions of Marie Bonaparte (1882-1962) to the psychoanalytic movement and will argue that diversity, defined in terms of Bonaparte's gender, method, and international outlook, lay at the very heart of her original and significant work. Bonaparte was active in the psychoanalytic movement in France as the translator of many of Freud's works, the author of numerous texts herself, and a benefactor whose financial support made possible publications internationally under the Imago label as well as Freud's escape from Austria to England in the wake of the Nazi rise to power. She was a founding member of the Parisian Society of Psychoanalysis in 1926, a society that lay outside the mainstream of scientific institutions in France. From the outset, this society would be different from the universities in France that had traditionally served as elite cultural spaces that excluded women. As Freud's patient, Bonaparte used psychoanalysis to turn her memories into stories that could alleviate her suffering and enable her to lead a better life. Once her own analysis was completed, she committed herself to expanding the impact of psychoanalysis by bringing it and its founder to the attention not just of doctors and scientists but of the broader intellectual community of writers and artists in France and the world.
Bonaparte was a leader in recognizing the value of crossing boundaries of gender, discipline, and nationality. She demonstrated that science need not exclude women, that it was not a separate sphere existing outside cultural currents and critiques, and that it could not be circumscribed by national borders. It would appear that she had a grander vision for women and science than does the US National Academy of Science. Ultimately, one must ask why her vision has not prevailed and why so little is known of her contributions in France.