Gregory Zilboorg, visa photo for travel to Brazil, 1941
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The Life of Gregory Zilboorg, 1890-1940: Psyche, Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis
The Life of Gregory Zilboorg, 1890-1940: Psyche, Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis
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The Life of Gregory Zilboorg, 1940-1959: Mind, Medicine, and Man
The Life of Gregory Zilboorg, 1940-1959: Mind, Medicine, and Man
by Caroline Zilboorg
by Caroline Zilboorg
This meticulously researched two-volume biography recounts the life of the charismatic Russian-American psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg from his birth as a Jew in Tsarist Russia in 1890 through his death in New York City in 1959. He served as secretary to the Minister of Labour in Kerensky’s revolutionary government and as a young physician just behind the Russian front during World War I before escaping to America in 1919. After requalifying in psychiatry at Columbia University and analysis with Franz Alexander at the Psychoanalytic Institute in Berlin in the late 1920s, he became a prominent psychoanalyst in New York. His patients included wealthy and artistic figures, among them Marshall Field III, George Gershwin, Kay Swift, Moss Hart, Ralph Ingersoll, Lillian Hellman, Thomas Merton and members of the Warburg and de Menil Families as well as inmates at the notorious Sing Sing prison. He joined the Quakers in 1922, but turned increasingly towards traditional Christianity, converting to Catholicism in 1954. His writing includes important histories of psychiatry, for which he is still known, as well as examinations of suicide and the relationship between psychiatry and the law. In his final work he argued that there was no incompatibility between psychoanalysis and religion.
Forthcoming in two volumes from Routlege in the summer of 2021
Forthcoming in two volumes from Routlege in the summer of 2021
Me with my half-brother Greg, Bedford, New York, autumn 1948
Hal Babcock (Head of Butler Hospital), me and my father at the train station, Providence, Rhode Island, 20 May 1951
Me now, Brittany, France, 2020
A bit about me:
A bit about me:
As Gregory Zilboorg’s daughter and executor, I have had privileged access to family memories, memorabilia, documents, photographs and a library of Zilboorg’s considerable published work. The Zilboorg archives at the Beinecke Library at Yale also contain important material: Extensive personal correspondence there spans Zilboorg’s experience of family, revolution, the Russian and artistic communities in Mexico, and relationship with my mother from their first meeting in 1940. My scholarly work throughout my career-- including editions of letters (between modernist poets H.D. and Richard Aldington), an edition of autobiographical fiction (H.D.’s Bid Me to Live) and a biography (of the historical novelist Mary Renault) as well as a historical novel about H.D., Aldington and their contemporaries (Transgressions: Her Story, His Story, A Love Story, A War Story)-- has focused on contextualising twentieth-century figures. Work on H.D., a patient of Freud’s in the 1930s, brought me into contact with spiritual questing and early psychoanalytic thought, while the theoretical nature of modern literary criticism acquainted me with historical developments in psychoanalysis. The research required by my controversial subject stretched my understanding into the history of medicine and religious searching and allowed me to write an important biographical narrative of as much interest to general readers as to those within the fields of Russian history and literature, the First World War, medical history, psychoanalysis and religion.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Caroline-Zilboorg/e/B001HOO9TG/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0
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