Mira Gincburg

Mira Oberholzer-Gincburg ( Mira Gincburg, , 13 January 1884 – 12 December 1949) was a Swiss medical doctor and psychoanalyst of Russian-Polish origin. A pioneer of psychoanalysis in general and child psychology in particular, she was a founding member of the Swiss Society of Psychoanalysis in 1919 and worked in Switzerland and the United States as a child analyst.

Early life Mira Gincburg was born on 13 January 1884 to Rafael Saveliev and Ravka Salmanowa Gordin, a Jewish couple, in Dinaburg (then part of the Russian Empire, now in Latvia). Her father died when Gincburg was thirteen. She completed her schooling in Łódź and moved to Bern in 1901, and then to Zürich in 1903, to pursue her medical studies.

Gincburg spent time in Russia in 1904-05 for a teacher's examination. While there, she also participated in the failed 1905 Russian Revolution. She returned to Zürich, and resumed studying medicine at the University of Zurich in 1906. In September 1908, she submitted her thesis on the impact inorganic salts can have on the galvanic excitability of the nervous system.

Joining the Zürich wing of the International Psychoanalytic Association and the Association of Swiss Alien Doctors in 1911, Gincburg presented her analysis of a suicide attempt, contending that suicidal tendencies of a person with schizophrenia might not result directly from the condition itself but from the same factors involved in neurosis.

Oberholzer-Gincburg began a psychoanalytic clinic in Zürich with Emil Oberholzer after World War I ended. Following the ideological conflict between Jung and Sigmund Freud, the couple were among the founding members of the Swiss Society for Psychoanalysis (SSPsa) in 1919. She personally undertook analysis of her husband, and later referred him to Freud for further analysis. In 1923, she left their practice for some time to visit Freud for analysis in Vienna. She bore a son, Emil Hermann, in 1926.

Published articles Tolstoi über den Traum. Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse 2, p. 615 (1911–12) Mitteilung eines Kindheitstraumes. Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, 1-1, pp. 79-80 (1913) Aus der Analyse eines 13-jährigen Mädchens. Schweizer Archiv für Neurologie und Psychiatrie 26, pp. 287-292 (1930)