Interview of Charles Brenner: On the Occasion of the Publication of Psychoanalysis or Mind and Meaning1

C.B.: How did it happen that I suddenly decided to become a psychoanalyst? Well … I had no idea at the time; it just seemed natural to me, of course. That's what I wanted to be—that's what I wanted to be. But many years later in my own personal analysis, I finally found out at least some of the reasons—I think the most important ones—why I made that decision. My father died of aortic stenosis; he had rheumatic heart disease, I assume. My father died in my senior year in college. He and my mother were not really very close or loving, but they respected each other and so on, and his death had a very unfortunate effect on my mother. A few months after he died, she developed the idea that she was dying of heart trouble. You know, sort of an unconscious identification with him. And she became very sick in her own mind. She was studied, worked up, spent some time in a hospital. And the eventual decision by the doctors who diagnosed her—the eventual decision was that there was nothing physically wrong with her heart. And as a matter of fact, she lived for another thirty-five years. But that she was psychoneurotic. So … that was why I decided to become a psychoanalyst. Anything else you'd like to know, Bob?

R.M.: Lots.

C.B.: Well, fire away.

R.M.: What was your psychoanalytic training lik