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Henry Zvi Winnik

WINNIK, HENRY ZVI (1902–1982), Israeli psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Winnik was born near Chernovtsy (Bukovina) into a family of intellectuals and Zionists. His postgraduate experience included laboratory work with F. Georgi, and in psychiatric hospitals in Chemnitz and Berlin. In Berlin he met Wilhelm *Reich and Otto *Fenichel, through whom he entered psychoanalysis. He was trained at first at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, leaving with the advent of Hitler in 1933. He continued in Vienna with noted supervisors such as Helene *Deutsch, maintaining his contact with clinical psychiatry. He became a training analyst in 1938 and, on Anna *Freud's advice, left for Bucharest to develop analysis there. Political events there, however, and the outbreak of the war did not permit him to work. He left for Palestine in 1942 where he became the director of the Geha mental hospital of Kuppat Ḥolim, developing modern methods of institutional care. In 1950 he became the director of its Talbieh mental hospital in Jerusalem.

From 1944 he was a member of the executive of the Israel Neuropsychiatric Society, and its chairman from 1961 to 1965. Winnik had met Max *Eitingon in Berlin and joined him at the Psychoanalytic Institute in Palestine. In 1955 he became its chairman – a post he held four times. From 1954 he was professor at The Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem. He founded the Israel Annals of Psychiatry and served as its editor-in-chief. His testimony in Israel's courts contributed to the establishment of the principle of irresistible impulse. Winnik published many papers on a broad range of psychiatric, psychoanalytic, and forensic subjects.


Sources: Encyclopaedia Judaica. © 2007 The Gale Group. All Rights Reserved.