Gregory Zilboorg

Who was Gregory Zilboorg?

Gregory Zilboorg 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, Ukraine on December 25, 1890 and studied medicine in St. Petersburg. In 1917 he served in the Ministry of Labor for two presidents. 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 psychoanalytic 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.