A Psychoanalytic Childhood: A Memoir of Growing up in Mid-Twentieth-Century New York

Writer Caroline Zilboorg tells the fascinating story of growing up in New York City in the 1950s as the daughter of the Russian-American psychoanalyst and medical historian Gregory Zilboorg, a pioneer of global psychoanalysis. This rich, evocative, and honest memoir, filled with private family photographs, brings a bygone era to life.

This moving memoir opens a door into the life of a young girl growing up in a psychoanalytic household. It offers insight into not only the expectations of girlhood in upper-class New York in the 1950s, but also the burgeoning psychoanalytic community at that time with particular focus on the brilliant Gregory Zilboorg.

Caroline Zilboorg draws on her memories of growing up in a what she calls ‘a psychoanalytic household’, and on a wealth of privately held scrapbooks and photographs. She recounts pivotal experiences from her birth in New York City in 1948 through the death of her father in 1959. Both chronological and reflective, the memoir tells the story of a girlhood shaped by the attitudes of the period towards femininity and masculinity, attachment and differentiation, as well as an account of her brief psychoanalysis with Margaret Mahler in 1955. The chronological narrative is placed throughout within the context of the long-term impact on the author’s personal and professional life, and the book includes 21 previously unpublished images selected from her personal archives.

This exceptional memoir is an homage to Freud, an intimate account of childhood and coming of age, and a privileged glimpse of a particular moment in psychoanalytic history. It is highly recommended to psychoanalysts, historians, and those interested in the lives of others.