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1931 is a long time ago, but it doesn’t seem so to me. That was the year I entered medical school. All my life I had wanted to be a doctor and here I was, ready to begin. The school buildings were familiar. Had been for years. The Boston Latin School, where I went to high school for four years, was just down the street from the medical school. I had passed it nearly every day for four years. I even knew the inscription on one of its cornerstones: “Ars longa,” it said, “vita brevis,” and more that I had read many times. But now I was part of it.
In college I majored in chemistry. Chemistry fascinated me, especially the course I took in my last year, physical chemistry. That was a pretty new subspecialty and one that I liked very much. We lived very close to the college and I can remember walking along Cambridge Street on my way to class thinking about van der Waals’ equations and what they had to say about the composition of matter. I also took the biology and physics that were required for admission to medical school, but much as I liked the sciences I studied in college, I had no desire to be a chemist. What I wanted was to be a doctor.
Not only so. By the time I entered medical school I had decided that I wanted to become a psychoanalyst. That seems like an unexpected ambition for a young fellow who was so fascinated by physical chemistry, doesn’t it? I had taken courses other than the ones in science. A course in Latin, for one, where we read Plautus and Terence and Horace. Horace was mostly rather dull, but the plays of Plautus and Terence were great
Charles Brenner (1913-2008) was a central figure in psychoanalysis and a mainstay of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly where he served on the Board of Directors for many years and published thirty-eight articles. A slightly different version of this memoir was published in the Quarterly in 2009, the year after Brenner’s death. This version was offered to the Quarterly by Ted Jacobs, who had had it in his possession for man
Charles Brenner (1913-2008) was a central figure in psychoanalysis and a mainstay of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly where he served on the Board of Directors for many years and published thirty-eight articles. A slightly different version of this memoir was published in the Quarterly in 2009, the year after Brenner’s death. This version was offered to the Quarterly by Ted Jacobs, who had had it in his possession for man