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Ralph greenson son

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Greenson, Ralph (1911-1979)

Ralph Greenson, American psychoanalyst and physician, was born on September 20, 1911 in Brooklyn, New York, and died on November 24, 1979 in Los Angeles, California.

He was the eldest child (by ten minutes, as he was a twin) born to his physician father and pharmacist mother in Brooklyn. He completed his premedical studies at Columbia University and his medical training at the University of Bern (1930-1934) in Switzerland. In Switzerland he met Hildi Troesch; they married and had two children, Daniel and Joan.

In 1935 he began an analysis with Wilhelm Stekel and undertook analytic training in the Active Psychoanalytic Institute in Vienna. Dissatisfied with the therapeutic effect of this work, he began "classical" training in Los Angeles in 1938 and had a personal analysis with Otto Fenichel. He held various positions in organized psychoanalysis, but mostly enjoyed teaching candidates, residents and medical students. He gave many public lectures which were very popular and well received. These were published in book form, as Loving, Hating, and Livi

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Ralph Greenson and his twin sister were born in Brooklyn, New York, on September the 20th in possibly 1910 or 1911: biographical sketches and obituaries dedicated to Dr. Greenson inconsistently cited the year of the sibling’s birth. However, all agree that he was given the name Romeo Samuel Greenschpoon while his twin sister received the name Juliet. Apparently, the twin’s father was a true fan of William Shakespeare; but even so, Romeo later asserted, his father did not know anything about the sonneteer’s tale of woe poetically spun around Juliet and her Romeo. You can believe that if you want.

After enduring ridicule during his childhood because of his name and his conscripted violin lessons, Romeo became a Ralph. He contracted his last name later in life and became a Greenson. The psychiatrist’s friends, however, referred to him by his childhood nickname, Romi.

Romi Greenson attended Columbia University and then earned his medical degree from the University of Berne in Switzerland. He served a two year internship at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Los An

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Writing anything about Ralph Greenson that doesn’t paint him as Satan-incarnate will undoubtably bring out the rock-dwellers, but I don’t choose to shy-away from sharing things from a different perspective. I’ll preface this by sharing how I too once got on the Greenson hate wagon, convinced he loomed over Marilyn like some Svengali. However, over my last decade (!!!) of archive work, I’ve come to appreciate Greenson as a misguided yet caring man who simply couldn’t see the forest for the trees when it came to his most notorious patient.

A common narrative puts Greenson as some google-eyed hack who seduced Marilyn (definitely mentally, sometimes physically) with some pseudoscience nonsense. On the contrary, Greenson worked with some of the biggest names in Hollywood, including Tony Curtis, Marlon Brando and Vivian Leigh. Would his treatment methods pass an ethics board today? No, definitely not, but at the time, Greenson received respect in the psychiatry world as a thought-leader. With this in mind, it’s not shocking Dr. Marianne Kris recommen

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