Commentary: Charles Brenner’s Memoir

About a year before he died, Charles Brenner called me aside following the class we taught together at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and handed me a large manila envelope. “Take a look at this,” he said, “and let me know what you think. I may do more, but that’s it for now.” I thought that Charlie, as he was known to friends and colleagues, was asking me to read and comment on a new paper of his. This surprised me as he had not published anything for some years, and I was unaware that he had been working on anything new.

Finding a memoir in that envelope multiplied my surprise many times over. Charles Brenner was one of the last people I expected to write about himself. In the more than half century in which I worked with him and shared a warm friendship, I never heard him spontaneously utter a word about his private life. And, if asked directly about any part of it—a rare occurrence as all who knew him understood his reticence to speak about anything personal—his answer would be brief and nonspecific. He would share a general statement such as “things are fine” or “the family is doing well,” but nothing more than that.

About the field of psychoanalysis and his experiences as an analyst, however, Charlie had a good deal to say. As is amply clear in his memoir, Charlie had strong views about the workings of the mind and the analytic process and was not reticent in expressing

them. He did this with unwavering conviction about the correctness of his ideas, a quality that conveyed an unusual degree of self-confidence.

Charlie was equally articulate about other fields that interested him, including art, literature, history and (especially) music. There were, in fact, few topics about which Charles Brenner did not have an impressive fund of knowledge. It was rare to be in