Gregory Zilboorg

Gregory Zilboorg (Russian: Григорий Зильбург) (December 25, 1890 – 1959) was a psychoanalyst and historian of psychiatry who is remembered for situating psychiatry within a broad sociological and humanistic context in his many writings and lectures.

Zilboorg was born in Kiev on December 25, 1890 and studied medicine in St. Petersburg. In 1917 he served in the Ministry of Labor for two presidents (Aleksandr Kerenskii and Georgii L'vov).Zilboorg emigrated to the United States in 1919 and for a time translated literature from Russian to English while studying medicine at Columbia University. Among the works he translated is Evgenii Zamiatin's "We".

After graduating in 1926, he worked at the Bloomingdale Hospital and eventually established a psychoanalitic practice in New York City. From the 1930s onward, Zilboorg produced several volumes of lasting importance on the history of psychiatry. "The Medical Man and the Witch During the Renaissance" began as the Noguchi lectures at Johns Hopkins University in 1935. This volume was followed by "A History of Medical Psychology" in 1941 and "Sigmund Freud" in 1951.

Zilboorg's patients included George Gershwin, Lillian Hellman, Ralph Ingersoll, Edward M.M. Warburg, Marshall Field, Kay Swift and James Warburg. The musical "Lady in the Dark" is reportedly based on Moss Hart's experience undergoing analysis with Zilboorg.

Zilboorg married Ray Liebow in 1919 and they had two children (Nancy and Gregory, Jr.). He married Margaret Stone in 1946 and they had three children (Caroline, John and Matthew).

Literary Archives

Zilboorg's papers at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, contain manuscripts of several of his publications as well as his personal correspondence with Margaret Stone Zilboorg.

Bibliography

Writings

*"The medical man and the witch during the renaissance" (1935)
*"A history of medical psychology" (1941)
*"Sigmund Freud" (1951)
*"Psychology of the criminal act and punishment" (1954)

Translations

*"He, the one who gets slapped" by Leonid Andreyev, translated from the Russian with an introduction by Gregory Zilboorg (1921)
*"We" by Evgenii Zamiatin, translated from the Russian by Gregory Zilboorg (1924)
*"The criminal, the judge and the public; a psychological analysis" by Franz Alexander and Hugo Staub, translated from the German by Gregory Zilboorg (1931)
*"Outline of clinical psychoanalysis" by Otto Fenichel, translated by Bertram D. Lewin and Gregory Zilboorg (1934)

References