Lawrence Kubie


Lawrence Schlesinger Kubie was an American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who practiced in New York City from 1930 to 1959. Kubie had several celebrity patients, including Tennessee Williams, Leonard Bernstein, Moss Hart, Kurt Weill and Sid Caesar.

Life

After graduating from Harvard College in 1916, Kubie took a medical degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1921 and later became a Freudian psychoanalyst. He was a faculty member at Johns Hopkins University, Columbia University, the Yale School of Medicine and the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and was on the staffs of the Neurological Institute of New York and Mount Sinai Hospital.
Kubie wrote two books, Practical and Theoretical Aspects of Psychoanalysis and Neurotic Distortion of the Creative Process, and many articles. He was the editor of The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. He was formerly president of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and the American Psychosomatic Society, secretary of the American Psychoanalytic Association and a member of the New York Academy of Medicine.
In articles of 1930 and 1941, Kubie proposed a theory of 'closed reverberating circuits' underlying neurosis which was later drawn upon by Warren McCulloch, and discussed by John Z Young at the 9th Macy conference. Kubie attended the Macy conferences from 1942 to 1953. After 1941 he studied hypnosis, particularly in collaboration with Richard Brickner and Milton Erickson, and it was Kubie who invited Erickson to a Macy conference in 1942.
The playwright Tennessee Williams entered analysis with Kubie in 1957. In a New York Review of Books controversy about the treatment, Gore Vidal said that many people of the time saw Kubie as 'a slick bit of goods on the make among the rich, the famous, the gullible.' Vidal charged Kubie with attempting to discourage Williams from his homosexuality,
though John Lahr's biography of Williams disputes the claim.
Kubie died on October 27, 1973 in Baltimore.

Partial list of publications

With Milton H. Erickson
With Sydney G. Margolin