M. Verdoux's Night With The Analysts

It was clearly an evening of treat rather than a session of treatment when members at the December () meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association gathered to view Charlie Chaplin's classic comedy Monsieur Verdoux (). And although the entertainment was to be framed by introductory remarks from Dr. Kenneth Calder with a follow-up discussion, a certain endorsement of the pleasure principle was implicit in the remarks of the past president of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Addressing himself to the man, the movie, and the psychology, Dr. Calder first called attention to Chaplin's surpassing grace and mastery as a performing artist. His timing and his genius for combining themes, indeed for converting the otherwise horrible material of a modern day Bluebeard into an occasion for laughter, were presented as excellent examples of Freud's theory of humor. The connection between the comic's narcissistic triumph, in Freud's words, and Chaplin as one of life's survivors, in Calder's view, seemed provocatively apt.

But how far comedy may effect a relief from the conditions of the reality principle become more problematic when details from Chaplin's family life were recalled. Born in 1889 in London, he grew up in a Victorian theatre family. His father was a vaudevillian who drank heavily and whom Charlie hardly knew before the man's early death at 37 from alcoholism. Charlie's mother, following a brief elopement with a plantation owner to Africa, returned and married the dipsy vaudevillian, whom she had known previously. Three years later Charlie was born, and after another year the parents separated. His mother struggled to support him and his older half-brother from her acting, which was continually put in jeopardy by laryngitis, so that they often suffered under extreme poverty. At age five Charlie actually replaced his mother in the midst of a performance and was showered with money. Thus was his career strangely launched and his mother's ended. But before su