On January 25, Nicholas Young was honored by the New York Psychoanalytic Institute as the first recipient of the Charles Brenner Award for outstanding contributions to psychoanalytic education. The ceremony, at which Brenner personally presented the award, was a tribute to both men.
Widely recognized as an outstanding figure in contemporary psychoanalysis, Brenner has been a tireless and dedicated psychoanalytic educator. For decades he has contributed to the education of analysts through a substantial body of published work on theory and technique; through lecturing, case conferences, and participation on panels and in other formal discussions; through his leadership of the Ernst Kris Study Group at the New York Institute; through supervision and analytic work; and, finally, through his warm and generous personal influence on fellow analysts.
The honoree, Nicholas Young, has held, in a career spanning more than four decades, most of the major educational positions at the New York Institute. During his tenure as chair of the Education Committee, terms of office and a rotation system for committee members were established, subcommittees were reorganized, and a new training facility was sponsored in Westchester. The first two of these changes have endured; unfortunately, the Westchester project was abandoned after a few years. As chair of the Curriculum Committee, he oversaw creation of the faculty position of Assistant Lecturer, yet another change undertaken in response to the needs of the Institute in the 1970s. Those were times of ferment and innovation in the training of analysts, and he is proud to have had a role in shaping the developments that grew out of the intense discussions and debates of the day.
Significant as these developments were, however, it is clear that he considers his “hands on” work of greater importance. In clinical work, supervision, classroom teaching, and individual case seminars, his performance has often been described as nothing short of masterful. His reputation for work in the classroom setting was recently attested by the fact that for two years running, following his retirement after a quarter century of teaching the Institutes clinical dream course, he was called back to the classroom by popular demand, even though the candidates then had had no firsthand contact with him. In the words of a former student, “his performances in the classroom or seminar were like those of a virtuoso musician conducting master classes.”
Born in Transylvania, the young Dr. Young arrived in this country in 1943. Trained in Switzerland as a physician and psychiatrist, he quickly negotiated the bureaucratic hurdles that awaited immigrant professionals at that time, graduating from the New York Institute in 1950. His career as an analytic teacher began almost immediately. He taught “A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis” in the Institute's extension school and by 1952 had become a lecturer at the Institute. In 1956 he was made a training analyst. Phyllis Greenacre, Otto Isakower, and Bertram Lewin are among those he cites as important influences. As if passing along the complimentary comparison made by his musically inclined student, he praised Lewin's classroom work as often having a “coloratura” quality.
He recalled with pleasure that in 1972 he was invited to teach the dream course at the Baltimore-Washington Institute. After that, he was invited to conduct case conferences for candidates and members, and for a while became a pedagogic commuter. “It's very clear,” he remarked, “that I was hooked on teaching.”
His case seminars became recognized as so extraordinary that he was invited to conduct them at the Institute of the Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis, the Columbia Institute for Psychoanalytic Research and Training, and Payne Whitney Hospital.
But over the years it was the small case conference that became the pedagogic art around which his skills as a teacher coalesced. For thirty years, virtually without interruption, he has continued case seminars in his home, where his personal charm, warmth, fine sense of humor, and generosity have been unfailing. Analysts and candidates arrive at the apartment of Nicholas and Marianne Young to find the table in the living room brimming over with food and drink. But delicious and satisfying though these may be, they are but hints of the intellectual bounty Nicholas Young has so unstintingly shared with his colleagues.