Dr.’s consultation room. Sunny Arnold Gilberg lives near Wilshire Boulevard. Natural light spills over the wooden floor, his houndstooth-upholstered armchair, a low-slung sofa covered in a colorful Guatemalan blanket.
The Beverly Hills psychiatrist has been seeing patients for more than 60 years, in rooms like this one and at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he’s been a visiting doctor since the 1960s.
He treats famous celebrities and people who are not famous at all. He sees patients who don’t have a lot of money and some who could buy out his entire office and not run out of money.
Gilberg, 89, has managed enough people in Hollywood, and advised so many directors and actors on the science of character behavior, that his likeness is seen in films about how people float between each other’s dreams.
Nancy Meyers’ film “It’s Complicated” briefly features a psychiatrist character with an Airedale terrier – a doppelganger of Belle, Gilberg’s dog who lived in studies until her death in 2018, going back and forth between doctor and patient like a Wimbledon spectator.
“If you were making a movie, he’d be a Philip Roth-esque lead actor,” said John Burnham, a Hollywood talent agent who had been patient with Gilberg for decades starting in his 20s. He is always curious and interested. He gave good advice.”
Since Gilberg opened his practice in 1965, psychotherapy and psychotherapy have gone from highly stigmatized secrets to something people embrace in acceptance speeches. His long-standing prescriptions for fresh food, sunlight, regular exercise and meditation are now widely accepted tenets of health, and are no longer the sole province of LA hippies.
Beverly Hills psychiatrist Dr. Arnold Gilberg, 89, is the last living person who trained under Franz Alexander, a student of Sigmund Freud.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
He has watched people, including himself, grow in wisdom and embrace many ways of life. He also watched people become lonely and rigid in their political beliefs.
On a recent afternoon, Gilbert sat for an interview with The Times at a glass-topped desk in his consulting room, framed by a wall full of degrees. At his elbow were several copies of his first book, “The Myth of Aging: A Prescription for Emotional and Physical Well-Being,” which comes out Tuesday.
In more than 200 pages, this book contains everything Gilberg wishes to tell the many people who will never enter his office. After a lifetime of listening, the doctor is ready to speak.
Gilberg moved to Los Angeles in 1961 to train at what is now the Los Angeles General Medical Center. He did his residency at Mount Sinai Hospital (later Cedars-Sinai) with the famous Hungarian-American physician Dr. Franz Alexander.
Among Sigmund Freud’s fellow students, Alexander was an outsider. He disputed Freud’s insistence that patients needed years of near-daily sessions in the analyst’s bed, arguing that an hour or two a week in a comfortable chair would do the most good. He believed that patients’ psychological problems arose more often from difficulties in their personal relationships than from dark fluctuations in their sexual development.
Not all of Alexander’s theories have aged well, says Gilberg — repressed emotions don’t cause asthma, to name one theory that has been torn. But Gilberg is the last person alive who trained with Alexander directly and retains his mentor’s determination to fight the herd.
If you walk into Gilberg’s office looking for a prescription for an antidepressant, for example, he’ll suggest you go somewhere else. Psychiatric medications are appropriate for certain mental conditions, he said, but he prefers that patients first try to address any stressful situations in their lives.
She has advised patients to take care of their bodies long before “healthy” became a buzzword. Not that you force them to exercise and eat healthy, of course, but if they don’t, they’ll hear about it.
“They know how I feel about all these things,” he said.
He tells most new patients to start with a maximum of 10 sessions. If they haven’t made any progress after 10 visits, you think, chances are he’s not the right doctor for them. If he is there, he will see them as long as they need.
Another patient started seeing him at the age of 19 and returned regularly until he died a few years ago at the age of 79.
“He had patients that he cared for over time, and families that came back to him over time,” said Dr. Itai Danovitch, who chairs the department of psychiatry at Cedars-Sinai. “It’s one of the benefits of being a doctor who thinks so dramatically.”
Shortly after opening his private practice in 1965, Gilberg was contacted by a prominent Beverly Hills couple seeking custody of their son. The treatment went well, Gilberg said, and the satisfied family passed her name on to several well-connected friends.
As a result, over the years his practice has included many recognizable names (no, he won’t tell you who) and people who live ordinary lives.
They all have the same concern, Gilberg says: Their relationships. Their children. Their purpose in life and their place in the world. No matter what you achieve in life, it seems that your worries are always the same.
When appropriate, Gilberg is willing to share that his own life has had bumps and detours.
He was born in Chicago in 1936, the middle of three boys. His mother was a housewife and his father was a scrap metal worker. Money was always tight. Gilberg spent a lot of time with her grandparents, who lived next door to their oldest daughter, Belle.
The house was a constructive place for Gilberg. He was very close to his grandfather – a rabbi in Poland who built a successful waste management business after moving to the US – and his aunt Belle.
Paralyzed after a childhood accident, Belle spent most of her time indoors, expressing a sadness that even at age 4 made Gilberg worry for her safety.
“It’s one of the things that got me into medicine, and then into psychiatry,” Gilberg said. “I felt very close to him.”
He and his first wife raised two children in Beverly Hills. Jay Gilberg is now a real estate developer and Dr. Susanne Gilberg-Lenz is a gynecologist (and only one half of the father-daughter doctors at Cedars-Sinai).
The marriage ended when he was 40 years old, and although the breakup was painful, he said, it helped him better understand the kind of loss his patients experienced.
He found love again in his 70s with Gloria Lushing-Gilberg. The couple has 16 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. They got married four years ago, after almost two decades together.
“As the age of the psychoanalyst or psychiatrist, we have the ability, through our life experience, to understand more and know more,” he said.
It’s part of what keeps him going. Although he has reduced his hours significantly, he is not ready to retire. He is always active as he advises his patients to be, both personally (he was ordained a rabbi a few years ago) and professionally.
In all the social steps he has made during his work on acceptance and inclusion, he also sees that patients are lonelier than before. They spend less time with friends and family, they have trouble finding partners.
We are divided and we suffer because of it, he said, as individuals and as a society. People still need to be cared for.
Unlike many titles on the self-help shelves, Gilberg’s book promises no tricky little hacks of happiness, no “you’ve-been-thinking-this-all-wrong” twists.
After 60 years of working with Hollywood stars and ordinary Angelenos, Gilberg is ready to share what he’s learned with the world.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
His instructions are along deceptively simple lines: Take care of your health. Say thank you. Choose to let go of harmless clicks and petty arguments. Find the people you belong with, and stop holding yourself and others to impossibly high standards.
“People have the power to heal themselves, and I’ve become a big believer in that. Not everyone needs to be in therapy for 10 years to see it,” he said. “A lot of this is within you. You have the ability to overcome things and obstacles within you, and you can do it.”
So what is “it”? What does it mean to live a good life?
Gilberg pondered the question, hands clasped under his chin, the traffic outside humming in anticipation.
He said: “It means that a person has been able to look after himself, and he feels somehow happy with his existence.”
The best any of us can hope for is … to be somehow happy?
All right, said Gilberg. “It’s a happy life in a way, it goes on, which is normal. And hopefully, if someone wants to pursue that, some kind of personal relationship.”
As it turns out, there are no houses in happiness. You can visit, but no one really lives there. The happiest people know that. They live in places that are not perfect but could be worse. They try to treat their neighbors well. Most of the time there is chaos in the house. They are still bringing people in.
I’m happy somehow, sometimes, with someone else to talk to.
It’s that simple. That’s how hard it is.
