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It is an honor and a privilege to write an obituary for Dr. Charles Brenner. Actually, I wish to write about three Charles Brenners: Charlie the scholar and polymath; Charlie the man, sometimes endearingly known as Bud or Buddy; and Dr. Charles Brenner, the psychoanalytic institution, theoretician, clinician, and teacher. I am not going to review his curriculum vitae, his voluminous contributions to the psychoanalytic literature, or his numerous positions at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, the American Psychoanalytic Association, the International Psychoanalytical Association, or his role at The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, nor will I list the numerous honorary lectures he delivered. These are well known and recorded elsewhere.
I will begin with Charlie the scholar and polymath. Reared by a schoolteacher mother and a lawyer father in an intellectually stimulating environment, he went to the venerable Boston Latin School, Harvard College before his fourteenth birthday, and Harvard Medical School before he was eighteen. He was determined to become a psychoanalyst, having read Freud in German as a young man. He realized that he should have a thorough grounding in medicine and neurology and became a house officer at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, studying neurology at the Boston City Hospital with Drs. Denny-Brown and Houston Merritt. At the same time, he trained in psychiatry at the Boston Psychopathic Hospital and in psychoanalysis as a Sigmund Freud Fellow at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. He accompanied Dr. Merritt to Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons and to Montefiore Hospital in New York.
Dr. Brenner joined Drs. Jacob Arlow, David Beres, and Martin Wangh in a study group that was mutually stimulating and productive.