chaplin
 
Photo Essays
1. Exile’s Return
2. Chaplin’s Parents
3. Hannah Chaplin’s Femmes Fatales
4. Playing Dress-Up  In The Land of Make Believe
5. Teenage Girls and Fear of Aging
6. Chaplin’s Three Teenage Wives
7. Mildred Harris
8. Lita Grey
9. Oona O’Neill
10. Chaplin’s Father
11. A Royal Lion
12. Vesta Tilley as Bertie
13. Ella Shields as Bertie
14. Making A Living
15. The Lion Comique’s Son: Dressed Like A Bum
16. Monsieur Verdoux as a Lion Comique
17. Calvero as a Lion Comique
18. The Lion Comique’s Son in the Limelight
19. Charlie as a Child
20. The Kid’s Lucky Break
21. Syd Chaplin
22. A Family Album of Theatrical Drunks
23. Chaplin’s Family Romance
24. Edna Purviance
25. Purviance’s Influence on Chaplin’s Character
26. Essanay
27. Chaplinitis
28. Chaplin’s Predecessors
29. Eye Contact: Audience-Performer Intimacy
30. Chaplin the Auteur
31. Chaplin’s Two Autobiographies
32. Going It Alone
33. The Circus
34. Autobiographical Starvation Scenes From The Gold Rush
35. Autobiographical Madness Scenes in Modern Times
36. Two British Music Hall Traditions and Topical Comedy
37. The Great Dictator
38. Fatal Attraction: Joan Barry
39. Monsieur Verdoux: Guillotine or Hatchet Job?
40. Limelight
 
Chaplin: A Life In Film
Home  |  Author  |  Photo Essays  |  Links  |  Blog  |  Events  |  Reviews  |  Contact
 The Circus
   
Review of: His Brother’s Keeper: A Psycho-biography of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
By Stephen M. Weissman
(FROM: PSYCHOANALYTIC QUARTERLY, V.60:no.3:p.513-515)
By Stanley M. Coen,M.D.
Faculty, Columbia Psychoanalytic Institute

Who said psychobiography is dead? Here is Stephen Weissman writing an engaging, novelistic account of the life and creativity of Coleridge. Weissman tells his story very well—simply, elegantly, with a minimum of psychoanalytic jargon, using psychoanalytic formulations in a spare but effective manner. The reader easily becomes absorbed in Weissman’s personal and convincing rendering. His psychological reading of the interrelations among Coleridge’s life, conflicts, and creative work is fascinating. This is a moving but sad tale. I recommend it to psychoanalysts, academicians, and literary critics as an example of fine biography illuminated through psychoanalytic psychology. The criticisms I offer involve matters of taste, bias and perspective. In no way should they be understood as detracting from Weissman’s accomplishment.
Weissman is more concerned with telling his story than elaborating a psychoanalytic theory of artistic creativity. Thus the hypothesis he offers can be accepted or rejected, in whole or in part, without detracting from his overall work. In the introduction,  he outlines briefly his psychology of artistic creativity as involving loss, separation, sensitivity, and depression, which are managed by creative imagery transformed into permanent works. Creativity is exhilarating, intoxicating and addictive—certainly a useful theory to apply to Coleridge (and his opiate addiction). Weissman, however, connects this creative ecstasy only to wishes for immortality, in line with his idea of vital defense against loss and depression. This is too narrow a formulation….

I recommend this book as delightful reading, something which can rarely be said for psychoanalytic books. If Weissman heeds by wish for a little more theory and criticism, I hope that he nevertheless preserves his elegant narrative style in his next book.

Stanley J. Coen, author of:
Between Author and Reader: A Psychoanalytic Approach to Writing and Reading



www.ChaplinALife.com
© 2008 All Essay Rights Reserved.

All images from Chaplin films made from 1918 onwards, Copyright © Roy
Export Company Establishment._Charles Chaplin and the Little Tramp are trademarks and/or
service marks of Bubbles Inc. S.A. and/or Roy Export Company
Establishment, used with permission.

 
 
the book
Check Out Recommended Books
Photo Essays with Picture and Video
Buy Recommended Chaplin Films
Visit Our News and Blog Page