Lillian Hellman by Dorothy Gallagher

Author:Dorothy Gallagher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2014-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

10

Lillian Hellman’s Analyst

IN THE 1930s psychoanalysis was in high vogue in New York’s artistic circles. Many of Hellman’s friends were being analyzed by the fashionable Dr. Gregory Zilboorg. George Gershwin was treated by Zilboorg, as was Gershwin’s mistress, Kay Swift; Ralph Ingersoll, Hellman’s one-time lover, was a patient of Zilboorg’s, and so were Herman Shumlin and Arthur Kober. Hellman, herself, began her analysis with Zilboorg in 1940, and continued to see him both as analyst and friend until the late 1950s.

Zilboorg was a short, stocky man, Jewish, born in Kiev in 1890. A photograph of him taken in the 1940s shows him to have a high, balding forehead, a thick moustache that does not quite reach the outer corners of his mouth and hangs in a deep fringe over his upper lip. He wears a bow tie, and rimless glasses that magnify dark, intense eyes.

Eventually, there would be questions about Zilboorg’s biographical and professional claims: Was he actually part of the pre-revolutionary Kerensky government of Russia? Did he attempt to fight off the Bolsheviks? A more serious problem was whether or not he was licensed to practice medicine in New York State, since no record of a medical license issued to him could be found. But these questions did not arise until later. In 1931, Zilboorg opened a private practice as a psychiatric analyst, working from his home in the East Seventies in New York City.

There seems to be no question that Zilboorg was a man of great charisma and brilliance. He spoke three languages, including his native Russian. He had taught himself English within a few months of arriving in America, and he translated books from Russian into English. He wrote respected books himself, and was a co-founder of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly.

There are many stories about Zilboorg’s treatment methods. He often discussed his patients and the disclosures they made to him with his other patients, many of whom were known to one another. He traveled with his patients on vacations, went to parties at their homes. He had definite ideas about how his patients should run their lives. For instance, both George Gershwin and his mistress, Kay Swift, were in treatment with him. When Swift wanted to divorce her husband, Zilboorg forbid her to do so. He also insisted that Swift, a very attractive woman, needed to have sex with him during their sessions; this activity, he said, was part of her treatment, for which she was naturally required to pay as usual. Zilboorg charged a great deal of money for his services. He charged Hellman seventy-five dollars an hour, the equivalent of about $700 in today’s money.

George Gershwin came to Zilboorg with a number of physical problems; Zilboorg dismissed them as the symptoms of a neurotic, and when Gershwin suddenly died of a brain tumor in 1937, some of Zilboorg’s colleagues believed that Zilboorg was to blame for a faulty diagnosis.

In 1942, a couple of Zilboorg’s patients who felt that he had manipulated them, and taken advantage of them financially, complained about him to the Board of the New York Psychoanalytic Society.

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