At a time when most psychiatrists confined themselves to narrow specialties, Dr. George H. Pollock spread his wings and ventured into the disparate fields of creativity, psychosomatic illness and mourning.
More than just a practitioner of the interdisciplinary approach, Dr. Pollock used his influence as head of major professional associations to encourage others to adopt it. Dr. Pollock, 80, former director of the Institute for Psychoanalysis in Chicago and former president of the American Psychiatric Association, died of heart disease Friday, Dec. 12, in a Houston hospital.
Born to poor Polish immigrants on Chicago’s Northwest Side, Dr. Pollock entered college at 15, and by 21 he had earned a medical degree while working two or three jobs. After graduating from the University of Illinois Medical School in Chicago in 1945, Dr. Pollock headed for Ft. Riley in Kansas, where he treated soldiers and witnessed the psychological toll of warfare. That experience sparked Dr. Pollock’s interest in mental health, his son Rayphael said.
Dr. Pollock, a longtime Hyde Park resident, subscribed to 300 academic journals, which ranged from sociology to medicine to psychology. His interest in reading didn’t end with journals. His library contained 40,000 books. Dr. Pollock “considered it a sin to go anywhere without reading material,” his son said.
“When we were kids, we used to go see the White Sox play. My father would come and have a stack of medical journals with him,” his son said. “He was the only person at Comiskey Park with medical journals.”
He encouraged his five children to value learning. A family ritual was devouring the Sunday papers over bagels and lox, with Dr. Pollock prodding his children to comment on what they read, then following through with questions that helped them reach their own conclusions.
Professionally, Dr. Pollock built a reputation as an energetic leader who was not afraid to push his colleagues’ buttons.
As president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Dr. Pollock oversaw a traditional organization, all of whose members had backgrounds in medical psychiatry. Yet he saw the need to open the field to new ideas and prodded the group to train social workers, anthropologists, historians and clinical psychologists in psychoanalysis.
As head of the American Psychiatric Association in the late 1970s, Dr. Pollock embraced research that argued homosexuality was not a disease, helping persuade skeptical colleagues to abandon that long-held view.
“In a profession that’s very focused on the status quo, he could think outside the box in a non-conforming way, but also practically,” colleague Steve Weissman said. “He was very forward-thinking.”
In his own research, Dr. Pollock was committed to the idea that psychology and biology were closely linked.
He tried to win over others to this idea. At a seminar he taught at the University of Illinois Medical School, Dr. Pollock would interview a patient whom he had never met and, by the end of class, would be able to identify the psychological themes to whatever medical problem the patient was experiencing.
Other survivors include his wife, Beverly; two daughters, Beth Ungar and Naomi; two other sons, Daniel and Benjamin; a brother, Melvin; and 10 grandchildren.
Services will be private.
