George Prochnik is an award-winning author and essayist whose work explores psychology, intellectual history, biography, and culture.
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Before Freudian psychoanalysis became the dominant approach to psychotherapy, physician Morton Prince pioneered influential ideas about dissociation, hypnosis, habit formation, and talk therapy that helped shape the early development of American psychotherapy.
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George Prochnik is an award-winning author, essayist, and scholar whose work explores intellectual history, psychology, biography, and culture. He is editor-at-large of Cabinet magazine and has written for publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Bookforum, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He previously taught English and American literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021.
Prochnik is the author of several acclaimed books, including The Impossible Exile: Stefan Zweig at the End of the World, which received the National Jewish Book Award for Biography/Memoir; In Pursuit of Silence: Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise; Putnam Camp: Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam, and the Purpose of American Psychology; andStranger in a Strange Land: Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem. He lives in New York City.External
The Artist as Aficionado
Co-authors: Joel Meyerowitz | Granta | July | 2025
Prochnik pays attention to the life and career of photographer Joel Meyerowitz with his customary thoughtful lyricism.
What’s the Role of the Artist in Calamity?
Co-authors: Paul Holdengräber | Lit Hub | February | 2021
Paul Holdengräber interviews George Prochnik as part of a series entitled The Quarantine Tapes, in which writers share how they are navigating the social-distancing existence necessitated by Covid-19.
Los Angeles Review of Books | June | 2017
Prochnik describes the friendship between Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem. He notes that their friendship was strained and ultimately destroyed due to differences of opinion about “how a person of conscience should address the unconscionable.” Scholem, influenced profoundly by Jewish mysticism, objected to Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil” as a minimization of the sadists’ enjoyment of the harm they caused and the power they wielded.
Publications by this author
A Memoir
Counterpoint Press | September | 2022
George Prochnik gives an account of his family’s decision to leave the United States. Informing this narrative are the wider stories of his ancestors’ decision to leave England and of the contemporary atmosphere of uncertainty and possibility.
Writing the Revolution
Yale University Press | November | 2020
A part of the Jewish Lives collection of biographies, this book examines the life of the nineteenth-century poet, satirist, and humorist Heinrich Heine. In vivid style, Prochnik shows how Heine was at the center of revolutionary, political, and literary movements of his age.
Searching for Gershom Scholem and Jerusalem
Other Press | March | 2017
A biography of the Israeli philosopher and historian who is widely known as the founder of modern academic study of the Kabbalah, an esoteric school of thought in Jewish mysticism.
It is also, in part, a memoir, as Prochnik weaves in meditations on his own relationship with his own Jewish identity especially as it relates to the history of Israel.Stefan Zweig at the End of the World
Other Press | May | 2014
In this award-winning biography of author Stefan Zweig, Prochnik focuses on the period from when he left Austria in the 1930s to his death in Brazil. More broadly, the book is a meditation on the predicament of Jewish artists exiled from their homelands in the wake of Nazism.
Sigmund Freud, James Jackson Putnam and the Purpose of American Psychology
Other Press | September | 2006
An illuminating account of Sigmund Freud’s only visit to America, when he visited Putnam Camp, a retreat in the Adirondacks set up by the Boston School, a group of psychologists, philosophers, neurologists and psychiatrists who were some of the most progressive thinkers of their day.
Listening for Meaning in a World of Noise
Penuin Random House | April | 2011
George Prochnik investigates the reasons why our world is so noisy and what effect it is having on us.
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Interview | March | 2025
“How loud everything is becoming,” wrote the poet and satirist Karl Kraus at the beginning of the 20th century. Kraus was referring to literal and metaphorical shouting.
What can we do today, when everything has become even more cacophonous, with the urge to block everything out? What do we even want to hear right now? And shouldn’t we be acting rather than listening? These are the questions that author George Prochnik explores in his acclaimed books The Pursuit of Silence and Stranger in a Strange Land.
In conversation with Paul Holdengräber, Prochnik explores the limits and enduring possibilities of listening in a time when the misfortune and noise of this world threaten to overwhelm our senses.Interview | February | 2019
Prochnik reflects on a moment in history rife with uncertainty. Ultimately, he argues that uncertainty can be seen as a form of faith and hope.
Interview | April | 2014
George Prochnik talks about his subject Stefan Zweig, the most widely translated living author in the world in his day. After Hitler’s rise to power, Zweig became an increasingly isolated exile.
