Charles Otchin—1900-1957

Doctor Charles Otchin died suddenly of coronary thrombosis while vacationing with members of his family in Florida during August 1957. He had not been ill previously, and there was no warning of his untimely end.

Doctor Otchin was born in Russia on October 4, 1900. He emigrated to the United States with his mother and brothers in 1920 and settled in New York. He graduated from the College of the City of New York in 1924, and received his medical degree (with honors: A. O.A.) from the New York University-Bellevue Medical School in 1928. Following two years of internship at Central Islip State Hospital, Israel Zion Hospital in Brooklyn, and City Hospital in New York, he applied himself to a psychiatric career at Central Islip State Hospital where he remained seventeen years, achieving the status of Senior Supervising Psychiatrist. In 1947 he left the service of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene to enter private practice in New York City and to complete his analytic training at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute.

While at Central Islip, Dr. Otchin was one of a handful of psychiatrists who participated as a group in animated psychoanalytic discussions. All the members of this group subsequently became members of the New York Psychoanalytic Society. Dr. Otchin became a regular member in 1952.

For ten years he served on the Psychiatric Staff of Mt. Sinai Hospital and for a year prior to his death he gave four hours a week to the Federation for the Handicapped. He began as a student and continued on the staff of the Treatment Center where his dedication to clinical psychoanalysis and his sympathetic rapport with his patients were well known to all with whom he worked. To his patients, as to his friends and family, his passing is a profound personal loss.

He is survived by his wife, Kathleen, two children—Arnold, twenty-two, a graduate engineer, and Selma, seventeen, a student—, his mother, and three brothers.