My interviews with Charles Fisher, M.D. were conducted in 1985 for the Oral History Project of the A.A. Brill Library of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. The interview is deposited in the Archives and Special Collections of the A.A. Brill Library.

Introduction to Charles Fisher oral history

We are delighted to see this history in print. Many of the stories here are family myths that we remember from our childhoods and that seemed then, as they do now, utterly fantastic. Chuck’s story is the stuff of Victorian novels–suicide mother, depressed and confessional father, bewildering and lonely childhood in an orphan home. During his long and arduous education, mostly at the University of Chicago, he barely supported himself as a stenographer. In his telling of the story, it is always bleak winter in Chicago. The wind off Lake Michigan lashed his fragile body (he weighed 110 pounds) and whipped his tears back towards his ears, as he shivered in his threadbare coat. Due to the Jewish quota system, he was denied entry into medical school and fortuitously found his way into a Ph.D. program in neurobiology, a detour which granted him a Ph.D., gained him entry into medical school, and led him to a major scientific discovery. Where his drive and direction came from remains mysterious. The story of his mother’s bad dream determining his life’s work is a lovely piece of retrospective fantasy but hardly adequate to explain a long and varied scientific career. That career is detailed here in fascinating detail. But for us, the beauty of the history is the glimpse it provides of the lost and lone little boy before he finds himself.

Carla Miner
Barbara Fisher
June, 2007