Commentary: Charles Brenner's Memoir

This memoir offers an illuminating account of Brenner’s life, mostly from 1931 when he started medical school until a year before his death in 2008 at age ninety-four. It is primarily an account of his professional life, although he also includes a number of personal details insofar as these relate to the inception and development of his career. In my comments, I will be highlighting two somewhat divergent aspects of Brenner’s account that I see as fundamental to his view of himself and to his relationship with the field of psychoanalysis: (1) the elevation of the personal over the theoretical; and (2) the repudiation of undefined and unobservable aspects of experience. I will conclude my remarks with a speculative discussion of the possible role these divergent aspects of Brenner’s character played in his distinctive impact on American psychoanalysis during the years of his ascendancy.

Brenner begins by taking up the unlikely prospect that he ever became a psychoanalyst at all. He documents the lack of recognition and esteem with which psychiatrists, and especially psychoanalysts, were held in the 1930s, underlining the fact that his early interests were in the hard sciences, mainly chemistry, and that he had an utter disinterest in matters psychological until nearly the end of college. Brenner tells us that the reasons for his life choices primarily had to do with the illnesses of his parents: first, his father’s death from rheumatic fever, then the subsequent depression and psychosomatic illness of his mother. He knew nothing of the unconscious impact of these events when he first formed a determination to become an analyst near the end of college,

but apparently came to understand these factors during the course o