(1963). Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 11:704-724 Variants of Comic Caricature and their Relationship to Obsessive-Compulsive Phenomena IN AN INTRODUCTION to a recent collection of parodies, Nathaniel Benchley (20) describes a scene in the French town of Nancy near the German border in the summer of 1938. A small man with a brief case was knocked down by an angry crowd and saved from severe bodily injury only by the timely intervention of some alert gendarmes for whom the scene was no novelty. An onlooker explained to the American visitor that the man was a local accountant who had such a strong facial resemblance to Hitler that he often felt impelled to make Hitleresque tirades at street corners or in cafés. Usually, the informant said "he ended these burlesques with Vive la France and everybody took it as a good joke, but sometimes things misfired, as they apparently had on that evening. Also there seemed to be other people who did not think that the Führer should have been derided in the first place." "All in all," Benchley comments, "the man was living dangerously no matter how you looked [This is a summary or excerpt from the full text of the book or article. The full text of the document is available to subscribers.] |
