Prochnik, George

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Prochnik, George

PERSONAL:

Married; wife's name Anne; children: three. Education: Harvard University, B.A., 1983; studied at Hebrew University.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY.

CAREER:

Writer and educator. Rubenstein Associates, New York, NY, senior writer; Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, lecturer; Arlington Community Residences Inc., VA, therapist for the chronically mentally ill.

WRITINGS:

Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology, Other Press (New York, NY), 2006.

SIDELIGHTS:

George Prochnik is writer who works for a public relations company in New York. Prior to living in New York, Prochnik and his wife spent nearly a decade living in Israel, and all three of their children were born there. Prochnik worked as a therapist for the chronically mentally ill in Virginia after graduating from Harvard. His work with the mentally combined psychology and psychiatry and spurred the topic of his first book, Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology.

Putnam Camp uses material from family archives, published correspondence, biographies, and other writings by Sigmund Freud and James Jackson Putnam to chronicle how Freudian psychology entered the United States to form one of the foundations for American psychology. Putnam, who was Prochnik's greatgrandfather, was the Harvard Medical School's first professor of diseases of the nervous system. He was a key beneficiary in Freud's 1909 visit to the United States, when Freud stayed in the family's Adirondack retreat, called Camp Putnam. A reviewer in the New Yorker commented that the author "provides fascinating, if occasionally arbitrary, details of the historical and social context" of Freud's visit to the United States. A Kirkus Reviews critic, however, called the work "sprawling, unwieldy, and uneven." Larry Kramer, writing in the Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, concluded: "I couldn't put this book down, but after doing so it took me three days and evenings to absorb it."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, January-February, 2007, Larry Kramer, review of Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology, p. 45.

Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2006, review of Putnam Camp, p. 668.

New York Times, December 24, 2006, Peter D. Kramer, review of Putnam Camp.

New Yorker, November 13, 2006, review of Putnam Camp.

Publishers Weekly, June 12, 2006, review of Putnam Camp, p. 39.

Weekly Standard, December 11, 2006, Edwin M. Yoder, Jr., review of Putnam Camp.