Zilboorg was born into a Jewish family in
Kyiv,
Ukraine on December 25, 1890 and studied medicine in
St. Petersburg, where he worked under
Vladimir Bekhterev. In 1917, after the
February Revolution, he served as secretary to the Ministry of Labor under two prime ministers (
Aleksandr Kerenskii and
Georgii L'vov). When the Bolsheviks came to power, he fled to Kyiv and established a reputation as a political journalist and drama critic. Zilboorg emigrated to the United States in 1919 and supported himself by lecturing on the
Chautauqua circuit and translating literature from Russian to English. Among the works he translated is
Evgenii Zamiatin's novel
We and
Leonid Andreyev's 1915 play
He Who Gets Slapped. Well received, that translation has been republished 17 times since that initial publication. 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. He also produced a series of clinical articles on subjects from the
schizoid personality to
postpartum depression he considered the latter as rooted in
ambivalence over motherhood and latent
sadism 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 of analysis with Zilboorg, who also examined other noted writers including
Thomas Merton. 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). His niece was cellist
Olga Zilboorg. According to both
Susan Quinn, and
Ron Chernow, Zilboorg sometimes engaged in unethical behavior, including financial exploitation of his patients. In an interview with Chernow, Edward M. M. Warburg reported that Zilboorg asked him for cash gifts and, in one instance, a mink coat for his wife. A biography written by his daughter,
The Life of Gregory Zilboorg (see further reading below), recounts in detail Zilboorg's spiritual journey, his friendship with the Dominican
Noël Mailloux, and his eventual
conversion to Roman Catholicism. ==Literary archives==