It is important to note that it is fairly hard to do a psychoanalysis on Marco Polo due to lost history. 

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We know that Marco Polo was one of the most incredible merchants in our world’s history. Although he wasn’t the first European to travel to many of these places he knew how to capitalize on his fame and fortune. He was a business man and he wanted his life explorations to be accounted and be set on the world stage. Polo was expanding on the family business after being taught by his father an uncle. Since Polo’s time in childhoods is mostly unknown it is hard to discern what happened to have him such a sense of fearlessness and adventure. Polo was given a wonderful education and trained to fair the high seas and foreboding lands of the lesser known. It could be thought that once his parents were untimely taken out of his life at an early age he felt he had no need to stay close to home. It could be possible that his only love left was that of exploration.

Polo didn’t decide to document his travels until after his imprisonment. Polo once he returned home fought for his home of Venice and was captured. His inmate, luckily for us, was a romantic writer by the name of Rustichello da Pisa. Marco Polo’s travels are then told and written down to pass the time. It is uncertain is Polo had visions of grandeur of his own life and adventures or to make the prison time more entertaining he embellished. However, the accounts of Marco polo are thought to be drastically over exaggerated in and filled with omissions and errors. Maybe, the romantic author thought it better to make the story more interesting for the rest of the world. These extraneous factors make it difficult to discern how Marco Polo saw the world and himself.

One thing that we can potentially discern is Polo’s sexuality and level of cultural acceptance. Throughout his travels he commented on the different ways people lived an interacted with one another. He was taken aback by polyandrous relationships in the South of China and in Tibet, where many men would share one woman. Polos conceptual ideas of power, structure, relationships, religion are put into a clearer view when he discussed and disagreed with different versions of sexuality. Polo’s concept of masculinity and sexuality were shown as he tried to reason his way through this expressions of sexuality that did not match his own construct of what society should be. Polo tried to place all this conceptualization through lens of patriarch showing that in his childhood he did have very conservative gender roles demonstrated to him. Polo was rather excepting of new cultures unless they went against his views of patriarchy and sexuality showing that although he was culturally accepting to a point. 

There is much is much to be desired for in regard to information about Polo. His literature focused more on the adventures than himself as an emotional human. He was very driven and war, robberies, attacks, imprisonment, and the strain of world travel seemed to make him more determined, rather than less.  We do know that he settled down and was married with children after his adventures were over. We will always be left to wonder if such a great adventurer finally was able to quench his thirst and settle down, or if he longed for adventure until his dying breath.