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It is a particular pleasure for The Psychoanalytic Quarterly to give special recognition to the seventieth birthday of Dr. Charles Brenner and to convey to him the best wishes of his many friends and colleagues in the psychoanalytic community. For us, it is something of a family celebration, as he has been a member of the Editorial Board of The Quarterly since 1972 and an Associate Editor since 1981. His continuing vigor, energetic participation in all manner of psychoanalytic affairs, and the high level of his current scientific productivity all combine to make it hard to believe that he has been active in psychoanalysis for nearly forty years. He has been, as we all know, widely acknowledged for many of those years as a truly outstanding and original theoretician, clinician, and teacher.
Of course, he started out at a far younger age than is usual. He was graduated from Harvard College in his native city of Boston in 1931 when he was seventeen years old. He then attended Harvard Medical School, already determined to become a psychoanalyst. At that time Freud's work was not yet a part of the established curriculum, so that Dr. Brenner had to pursue his interest with unusual independence of mind and scholarly determination, qualities which have marked his psychoanalytic career ever since those early days. He first read Freud on his own, in the original German, solidifying his youthful enthusiasm and crystallizing his intention to devote himself to the field.
During his preparatory years in medicine, his work in a neurology laboratory led him to pursue both clinical and research activities in neurophysiology and with a variety of neurological syndromes; those experiences contributed to his