The Life of Gregory Zilboorg, 1940–1959

Mind, Medicine, and Man

Caroline Zilboorg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032042152
• eBook ISBN: 9781000414882
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Life of Gregory Zilboorg, 1940–1959: Mind, Medicine, and Man is the second volume of a meticulously researched two-part biography of the Russian-American psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg and chronicles the impact of the Second World War on his work and thinking as well as his divorce, remarriage, and conversion to Catholicism.

With extensive references to Zilboorg's writing and politics, this book demonstrates the significance of his contributions to the fields of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in the context of his tumultuous intellectual, personal, and spiritual life. In his late work, he would argue, controversially, that there was no incompatibility between psychoanalysis and religion.

Grounded in a wealth of primary source material and impressive research, this book completes the compelling biography of a major figure in psychoanalysis. It will be of interest to general readers as well as scholars across a range of disciplines, particularly the history of psychoanalysis and religion.

Chapter 1

Confrontation

1940–1941

DOI: 10.4324/9781003190974-1

Throughout the war, Peg would be a constant point of reference for Gregory, an editor who corrected more than his spelling, who polished his vocabulary, pitched his register, and shaped his phrasing and thinking, an intelligent woman unfailingly affirming and nourishing his capacity to love. He, in turn, opened his heart: He told her he adored and admired and needed her, suggested presents she should choose that they would buy together – a fur jacket, a winter coat, gloves – and arranged for her to have a standard poodle puppy from Lillian Hellman’s country kennel, King KoKo, a bundle of brown curls with a white star on his chest. The ‘outstanding’ marriage George imagined would remain outstanding, but as war on the one hand and psychoanalytic and personal politics on the other swept through Gregory’s landscape in the 1940s, Peg was his confidante, the source of optimism and gaiety, both lodestar and anchor.¹

For Gregory, however, the demands of daily life continued at least superficially as if they weren’t lovers during a winter he found hectic and depressing. The international news was disturbing on all fronts. Nazi bombs fell on London while British soldiers killed Italians in North Africa and German and Italian troops attacked Yugoslavia and Greece. Gregory was determined to push on with his history despite the war and a crowded professional roster. As many of his wealthier patients became involved with war work that took them to Washington, London, and Jerusalem, he accepted cases he treated without charge: Polish and German refugees seeking official status came to him for evaluations for employment as industrial bakers or tailors, while doctors recently arrived from France sought his help in qualifying to practise in the United States. Although Gregory had always done a measure of pro bono consulting, he would soon find himself pressed financially as well as by the constraints of time. Asked to support everything from the Allies in general to a group to buy shoes for refugee children in England, he was obliged to refuse most requests as well as invitations to speak at dinners on relief and democracy and aid to Jews who wanted to leave Europe for Palestine or America. With both old and new patients scheduled for Christmas eve and the following week, he celebrated his 50th birthday quietly in the city before escaping to the country to see in the New Year with the family on the farm.²

Gregory had reluctantly accepted a particularly challenging patient just before the holidays. Sam Forsyth, a publicist employed by Ingersoll to boost PM, was a volatile alcoholic whom Gregory would treat for three months between 17 December 1940 and 18 February 1941. There were unavoidable gaps, including Christmas and New Year’s as well as five days at the end of January when Gregory spent a week in hospital with pneumonia, but the unreliable patient was often drunk or hungover and frequently simply ‘skipped’ appointments. His treatment posed problems for Gregory from the start.³

While the narrative of Gregory’s life in Russia is complicated by the paucity of extant documents, an account of what happened during and as a consequence of Forsyth’s treatment is complicated by the enormous volume of surviving evidence that includes not only the patient’s version as well as Gregory’s but reports of what other psychoanalysts thought might or must have occurred and lawyers’ interpretations of everyone’s story. Further, all the stories, told and retold to various people under various circumstances at various times, were inevitably slightly different. A more reliable witness than Forsyth, Gregory’s account seems the most convincing, but he naturally had a vested interest in defending himself from accusations of whatever validity. His being put in a defensive position at all was the result of personalities and agendas having less to do with the facts than with personal and professional politics of exactly the sort from which Gregory had tried to extricate himself when he had stepped back from the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute over the matter of the library and bookshop eight years earlier. The patient, an unstable man capable of unpredictable aggression who both admired and resented his doctor, would play a role as catalyst and pawn, while Gregory would struggle to defend everything he had ever done or hoped to achieve.

Gregory grew increasingly uncomfortable with the case. Recommended by Ingersoll, Forsyth had come to Gregory because of serious problems at work. His publicity consisted of spreading rumours and getting PM mentioned in gossip columns, a dicey strategy at best, and he seemed to have had little confidence in the paper or its management nor any understanding of or sympathy with Ingersoll’s aims. Like Gregory, he was a Jewish immigrant from Russia, but there the similarities stopped. He had come to America as a boy, grown up in rough poverty, and risen in life through bravado and threats. His idea of fun was lots of alcohol and sex with prostitutes. In spite of his crudeness and lack of education, he evinced a degree of charm but was given to violent verbal and physical outbursts. He had tried to jump out a window of Ingersoll’s office and had several times come to work with his hands bandaged after having been in fights. When he failed to appear for appointments, Gregory worried he might have committed suicide or attacked or killed one of the women with whom he had spent the night. It quickly also became clear that Forsyth wasn’t always comprehensive with the truth or even clear about what the truth might be.⁴

Forsyth was terrified and tense during their first sessions and had been drinking. He would have ‘partial fugues’ even when sober but hungover. Characteristically, Gregory began with a general consultation devoted to discovering why the patient had come and what he expected from treatment. When Forsyth soon told Ingersoll he didn’t think he could continue because Gregory was charging $225 a week, his employer told him to discuss the fee with Gregory and mentioned it himself. When Forsyth failed to broach the matter, Gregory finally asked him why he had misrepresented the $25 a session, $125 a week, he was actually paying. The patient said he didn’t know. With a limited capacity for reflection, Forsyth didn’t seem like a good candidate for psychoanalysis. Interpreting his miscalculation as ‘resistance’, Gregory proceeded as a psychiatrist and avuncular advisor.⁵

While therapy played a significant part in Forsyth’s life, Gregory had other patients and was typically occupied with an overwhelming number of activities. So busy he still hadn’t managed a visit with Sigerist to discuss not only professional but likely personal matters, in early January 1941 Gregory agreed to join the editorial board of the Journal of Criminal Psychopathology, assuming yet another responsibility as he prepared for a series of six fortnightly lectures on the psychopathology of neuroses to begin in the middle of the month at the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Institute.⁶

Gregory’s illness forced him to rest for the week he spent in hospital at the end of January, but he also had family concerns on his mind. Nine-year-old Greg was having problems at school. Easily hurt and brought to tears, he felt other boys were ganging up on him, was offended by something his athletics coach had said. Aware that his son was ‘seriously unhappy’, having trouble socialising, and disorganised both at home and at school, Gregory nevertheless felt Greg had recently shown ‘an increasingly sense of responsibility and Spartan manliness’. Rather than arranging a conference with his teacher, Gregory wrote to the head of the school. His distanced approach was more European than American, as was his sense that fortitude and a sense of responsibility would address his son’s sensitivity and rebelliousness. Greg’s struggles probably involved what today would be called attention deficit hyperactivity disorder complicated by dyslexia, but he was certainly not helped by a detached mother and an authoritarian father who, despite his love for his son, even when physically present was often distracted and impatient.⁷

Although still ‘fagged out’ at the beginning of February, Gregory was now actively involved in the life of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, where internecine tensions continued to fester. Brill had ceded the presidency to younger colleagues in 1936: Bert Lewin had served as president until 1939 when Lawrence Kubie took over, followed by the Hungarian-born Adolph Stern, one of Freud’s analysands, from 1940 until 1942. Under Kubie, the primary focus of internal politics had become the organisation and content of the Institute’s courses. Karen Horney, whose feminist rethinking of psychoanalysis threatened the established order and the Society’s commitment to Freudian tenets, had gained the backing of some students and members who either sympathised with her thinking or felt that divergent views should have a more central place in the curriculum. While Kubie supported classically trained psychoanalysts, Horney along with Clara Thomson formed an opposing faction. The child psychoanalyst David Levy attempted to intervene on Horney’s behalf. Ostensibly an agent of truth and peace, Levy regularly interjected himself into confrontations that had nothing directly to do with him. Feeling that Levy ground ‘his own little axes so implacably’ that he didn’t always know what he was up to, Kubie would call him ‘the self-appointed F.B.I.’, although the ‘impugning of dishonesty’ to those members with whom one disagreed had in fact become ‘the besetting sin of the Society on all sides’.⁸

Matters remained unsettled and acrimonious throughout the 1940–1941 academic year, during which Gregory served as chair of the Educational Committee, whose members included the Institute’s vice-president Lillian Powers as well as Kubie, Rado, Stern, and Fritz Wittels, an Austrian-born psychoanalyst passionately opposed to Horney’s ideas. Gregory and Rado were responsible for teaching the core ‘History of Psychoanalytic Literature’, while other members of the Institute – a heady mix of personalities including Gregory and Rado but also Daniels, Gosselin, Horney, Kardiner, Kubie, Levy (from spring 1941 president of the American Psychoanalytic Association), Lewin, Thompson, Stern, and Wittels – were responsible for the other courses.

In early January Gregory and Stern met with four students representing those who had written to Gregory as chair of the Educational Committee to complain that some students were less likely to be admitted to the Society if trained by faculty members who held views ‘not in accordance with libido theory’. According to Levy’s notes on his interview with Harold Kelman, one of Horney’s ardent supporters, Gregory, although purportedly sympathetic, had become ‘livid’ and used ‘verbosity, jokes, dramatics, and cleverness’ in a vain effort to persuade the students to specify instances or particular individuals who felt they had been intimidated or discriminated against.

The students may have had a point – those who did not embrace basic Freudian concepts such as the Oedipus complex were less likely to be welcomed into a society founded on the espousing of Freudian principles – but so did Gregory: How could he do something about a vague protest in which no individuals or facts were mentioned? With only rumours to go on, taking action on the students’ behalf would have involved the Educational Committee’s selection for censure or dismissal of particular faculty who the students went so far as to suggest might be ‘dropped from the list of approved instructors’ because of their non-traditional views.⁹

The Society’s members inevitably took sides. In a supposedly unbiased search for empirical confirmation, Levy now inserted himself into the fray and proposed to the Educational Committee that he survey students to gather evidence. The Committee, which hoped that the meeting with Stern and Gregory had addressed even if it hadn’t completely resolved concerns, had no interest in continuing to stir up dissent and rejected Levy’s offer. Refusing to be slighted, he went ahead anyway and sent out a questionnaire to current and former students in mid-February.¹⁰

Gregory may have been intimidating in what he saw as his defence of himself, the Educational Committee, and the Society and Institute, but many of his colleagues sympathised with his point of view. Both within and outside the Society he had friends who were neither intimidated nor offended, and he was invariably highly principled, capable of great kindness when not in a posture of defence, and generous to a fault – qualities which had earned him admiration and abiding friendships even if they didn’t make him a comfortable team player. At the Society he was backed by Kubie, Lewin, and Stern as well as the other members of the Educational Committee. Gregory counted among his friends by the early 1940s not only Sigerist, Abe Abeloff, Lewin, and Gosselin but the Catholic psychoanalyst Leo Bartemeier, one of the founders of the Detroit Psychoanalytic Society, and the psychiatrist James King Hall, the eminent director of the Westbrook Sanitorium in Richmond, Virginia – all of whom would offer Gregory significant support during the difficult months ahead.

With Forsyth, Gregory had worked hard to establish a rapport. Striving for common ground in an earl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series editor’s foreword
• 1 Confrontation: 1940–1941
• 2 ‘I do not consider myself up for charges’: 1941–1942
• 3 Mind, medicine, man: 1942–1943
• 4 War and peace: 1944–1946
• 5 Health and happiness: 1946–1950
• 6 Peace and prosperity: 1950–1953
• 7 Faith, hope, and charity: 1954–1955
• 8 ‘His should be the path of spiritual development’: 1955–1957
• 9 Time and tide: 1957–1959
• 10 Aftermath: coda
• Works cited
• Abbreviations and notes
• Index