Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1927)

M arne d? By Louis E. Bisch M. D., Ph. D. to psychology, especially to analytic psychology which deals so largely with the whys and wherefores of our emotions. If you stop to think of it, you will notice that all your feelings either are experienced in your imagination or they are expressed through actuality. Either you day-dream and feed your soul on your own mental images, actually built within your own mind by yourself, or you gain satisfaction by centering your interests upon some object outside yourself, toward which there is an outpouring of the feelings which nature has implanted within you. I don't mean to imply that an individual does wholly one thing or the other. Each of us is a mixture of both tendencies. NEVERTHELESS, as we mature, we tend more and more to try ourselves out in projecting our feelings. We try to find somebody or something to love. Each time we succeed in this quest of love we become bolder and more courageous. And with each love conquest in the outside world there results correspondingly less imagery, less reliance for satisfaction upon the imagination. What happens, however, if our love conquests are not so successful, if repeated attempts to project our feelings of love are thwarted? Why, then we undergo what psychoanalysts call a "flight from reality." We run away. We become timid and afraid. We become gun-shy of expressing our feelings. We get so bad sometimes that even when love comes in at the door we have lost both the ability to recognize such love and the ability to embrace it. We lose the faculty of knowing what love is. We get so we can't make love even if we want to. Now the point is that photoplay actors and actresses are continually fleeing from reality. Their work makes them that way. Living so largely in a world of fancy while acting, they unintentionally carry out with them into the outside world this very selfsame tendency of flight. Let me put it another way. If, for instance, you pretend love almost every day of your life, if you are continually acting love, you can't stop yourself pretending love, even if it be with a red-blooded human in private life who is in dead earnest. You find yourself unable to take such an individual seriously. You have lost in large measure your contact with reality. Or, what is even worse, you may think you are genuinely After the glamour and romance of the honeymoon fades away, the actor, with his innate habit of pretending, can't face the realities of life, says the doctor, in analyzing film divorces in love yourself, while all the time, unconsciously, you are acting. Furthermore, gaited for flight as you are, what are you most likely to do when discord steps in to mar your marital bliss? You flee from reality some more. You separate yourself from the reality of love physically. You remove your body from it, so to speak. You make the separation as complete and absolute as possible. You run for a divorce. Romance, to be sure, is anything but a serious common sense grappling with reality. In the romantic love stage that precedes marriage both the man and the woman are far too excited and upset emotionally to realize fully what they are doing. Everything looks rosy in love. The stern, hard, cold facts of reality are camouflaged by love until even the danger signs are misinterpreted. Character faults that make for incompatibility of temperament are overlooked. The sex urge often sweeps people off their feet and blinds them to the real issues involved. Infatuation shoves logic and reason to the wall. You cannot think any more, you only feel. And the hectic, highly-colored feeling tone of romantic love is often as different from the prosaic feeling-tone that marriage changes it to as day and night. A LL this is true of you and me when love grips us. -**-We are unable to realize how we will feel after the white heat of love cools off. That is why so many of us wake up disappointed after the romantic months pass and we find ourselves face to face with a situation we believe we did not bargain for. We blame our partners, of course — seldom do we hold ourselves to account. We often honestly think that we have been deliberately deceived. What is true of you and me as regards this business of love is a hundred-fold truer of movie people. They are in a romantic atmosphere most of the time. Even if they do not actually play love parts, the influence is the same. It is all imaginative stuff they do. They are always playing at pretending. A business or professional man, a mechanic, a laborer, a salesgirl or office worker, these people grapple with reality. Actors, contrariwise, grapple with phantoms and shadows. And so, of course, actors [ continued on page 94 ] Actors and actresses don't get divorces for fun 39