![\"Psychiatrist](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/1768314975_421_.jpeg\")
<\/p>\nDr. Arnold Gilberg\u2019s sunny consultation room sits just off Wilshire Boulevard. Natural light spills onto a wooden floor, his houndstooth-upholstered armchair, the low-slung couch draped with a colorful Guatemalan blanket.<\/p>\n
The Beverly Hills psychiatrist has been seeing patients for more than 60 years, both in rooms like this and at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he has been an attending physician since the 1960s.<\/p>\n
He treats wildly famous celebrities and people with no fame at all. He sees patients without much money and some who could probably buy his whole office building and not miss the cash. <\/p>\n
Gilberg, 89, has treated enough people in Hollywood, and advised so many directors and actors on character psychology, that his likeness shows up in films the way people float through one another\u2019s dreams.<\/p>\n
The Nancy Meyers film \u201cIt\u2019s Complicated\u201d briefly features a psychiatrist character with an Airedale terrier \u2014 a doppelganger of Belle, Gilberg\u2019s dog who sat in on sessions until her death in 2018, looking back and forth between doctor and patient like a Wimbledon spectator.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you were making a movie, he would be central casting for a Philip Roth\u2011esque kind of psychiatrist,\u201d said John Burnham, a longtime Hollywood talent agent who was Gilberg\u2019s patient for decades starting in his 20s. \u201cHe\u2019s always curious and interested. He gave good advice.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since Gilberg opened his practice in 1965, psychiatry and psychotherapy have gone from highly stigmatized secrets to something people acknowledge in award show acceptance speeches. His longtime prescriptions of fresh food, sunshine, regular exercise and meditation are now widely accepted building blocks of health, and are no longer the sole province of ditzy L.A. hippies.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Beverly Hills psychiatrist Dr. Arnold Gilberg, 89, is the last living person to have trained under Franz Alexander, a disciple of Sigmund Freud.<\/p>\n
(Robert Gauthier \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n
He\u2019s watched people, himself included, grow wiser and more accepting of the many ways there are to live. He\u2019s also watched people grow lonelier and more rigid in their political beliefs.<\/p>\n
On a recent afternoon, Gilbert sat for a conversation with The Times at the glass-topped desk in his consultation room, framed by a wall full of degrees. At his elbow was a stack of copies of his first book, \u201cThe Myth of Aging: A Prescription for Emotional and Physical Well-Being,\u201d which comes out Tuesday. <\/p>\n
In just more than 200 pages, the book contains everything Gilberg wishes he could tell the many people who will never make it into his office. After a lifetime of listening, the doctor is ready to talk.<\/p>\n
Gilberg moved to Los Angeles in 1961 for an internship at what is now Los Angeles General Medical Center. He did his residency at Mount Sinai Hospital (later Cedars-Sinai) with the famed Hungarian American psychoanalyst Dr. Franz Alexander.<\/p>\n
Among his fellow disciples of Sigmund Freud, Alexander was a bit of an outlier. He balked at Freud\u2019s insistence that patients needed years of near-daily sessions on an analyst\u2019s couch, arguing that an hour or two a week in a comfortable chair could do just as much good. He believed patients\u2019 psychological problems stemmed more often from difficulties in their current personal relationships than from dark twists in their sexual development.<\/p>\n
Not all of Alexander\u2019s theories have aged well, Gilberg said \u2014 repressed emotions do not cause asthma, to name one since-debunked idea. But Gilberg is the last living person to have trained with Alexander directly and has retained some of his mentor\u2019s willingness to go against the herd. <\/p>\n
If you walk into Gilberg\u2019s office demanding an antidepressant prescription, for example, he will suggest you go elsewhere. Psychiatric medication is appropriate for some mental conditions, he said, but he prefers that patients first try to fix any depressing situations in their lives. <\/p>\n
He has counseled patients to care for their bodies long before \u201cwellness\u201d was a cultural buzzword. It\u2019s not that he forces them to adopt regimens of exercise and healthy eating, exactly, but if they don\u2019t, they\u2019re going to hear about it.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey know how I feel about all this stuff,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
He tells many new patients to start with a 10-session limit. If they haven\u2019t made any progress after 10 visits, he reasons, there\u2019s a good chance he\u2019s not the right doctor for them. If he is, he\u2019ll see them as long as they need. <\/p>\n
One patient first came to see him at 19 and returned regularly until her death a few years ago at the age of 79.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s had patients that he\u2019s taken care of over the span, and families that have come back to him over time,\u201d said Dr. Itai Danovitch, who chairs the psychiatry department at Cedars-Sinai. \u201cIt\u2019s one of the benefits of being an incredibly thoughtful clinician.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not long after opening his private practice in 1965, Gilberg was contacted by a prominent Beverly Hills couple seeking care for their son. The treatment went well, Gilberg said, and the satisfied family passed his name to several well-connected friends. <\/p>\n
As a result, over the years his practice has included many names you\u2019d recognize right away (no, he will not tell you who) alongside people who live quite regular lives.<\/p>\n
They all have the same concerns, Gilberg says: Their relationships. Their children. Their purpose in life and their place in the world. Whatever you achieve in life, it appears, your worries remain largely the same.<\/p>\n
When it\u2019s appropriate, Gilberg is willing to share that his own life has had bumps and detours.<\/p>\n
He was born in Chicago in 1936, the middle of three boys. His mother was a homemaker and his father worked in scrap metal. Money was always tight. Gilberg spent a lot of time with his paternal grandparents, who lived nearby with their adult daughter, Belle.<\/p>\n
The house was a formative place for Gilberg. He was especially close to his grandfather \u2014 a rabbi in Poland who built a successful career in waste management after immigrating to the U.S. \u2014 and to his Aunt Belle. <\/p>\n
Disabled after a childhood accident, Belle spent most of her time indoors, radiating a sadness that even at the age of 4 made Gilberg worry for her safety.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s one of the things that brought me into medicine, and then ultimately psychiatry,\u201d Gilberg said. \u201cI felt very, very close to her.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 an obstetrician-gynecologist (and the other half of the only father-daughter pair of physicians at Cedars-Sinai). <\/p>\n
The marriage ended when he was in his 40s, and though the split was painful, he said, it helped him better understand the kind of losses his patients experienced.<\/p>\n
He found love again in his 70s with Gloria Lushing-Gilberg. The couple share 16 grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. They married four years ago, after nearly two decades together.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs a psychoanalyst or psychiatrist ages, we have the ability, through our own life experiences, to be more understanding and more aware,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s part of what keeps him going. Though he has reduced his hours considerably, he isn\u2019t ready to retire. He has stayed as active as he advises his patients to be, both personally (he was ordained as a rabbi several years ago) and professionally.<\/p>\n
For all the strides society has made during the course of his career toward acceptance and inclusivity, he also sees that patients are lonelier than they used to be. They spend less time with friends and family, have a harder time finding partners.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re isolated and suffering for it, he said, as individuals and as a society. People still need care.<\/p>\n
Unlike a lot of titles on the self-help shelves, Gilberg\u2019s book promises no sly little hack to happiness, no \u201cyou\u2019ve-been-thinking-about-this-all-wrong\u201d twist.<\/p>\n
![\"Psychiatrist](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/1768314975_115_.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
After 60 years working with Hollywood stars and regular Angelenos, Gilberg is ready to share what he\u2019s learned with the world. <\/p>\n
(Robert Gauthier \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n
His prescriptions run along deceptively simple lines: Care for your health. Say thank you. Choose to let go of harmless slights and petty conflicts. Find people you belong with, and stop holding yourself and others to impossibly high standards.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople have the capacity to self-heal, and I have become a firm believer in that. Not everyone needs to be in therapy for 10 years to figure it out,\u201d he said. \u201cA lot of this is inside yourself. You have an opportunity to overcome the things and obstacles that are in you, and you can do it.\u201d<\/p>\n
So what is \u201cit\u201d? What does it mean to live a good life?<\/p>\n
Gilberg considered the question, hands clasped beneath his chin, the traffic outside humming expectantly.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt means that the person has been able to look at themselves,\u201d he said, \u201cand feel somewhat happy about their existence.\u201d<\/p>\n
The best any of us can hope for is to be … somewhat happy? <\/p>\n
Correct, Gilberg said. \u201cA somewhat happy existence, off and on, which is normal. And hopefully, if the person wants to pursue that, some kind of a personal relationship.\u201d<\/p>\n
As it turns out, there is no housing in happiness. You can visit, but nobody really lives there. The happiest people know that. They live in OK neighborhoods that are not perfect but could be worse. They try to be nice to the neighbors. The house is a mess a lot of the time. They still let people in.<\/p>\n
Somewhat happy, sometimes, with someone else to talk to.<\/p>\n
It is that simple. It is that hard.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dr. Arnold Gilberg\u2019s sunny consultation room sits just off Wilshire Boulevard. Natural light spills onto a wooden floor,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":513272,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[5997,3383,229354,1582,276,13986,222704,229353,2961,2252,224,5337,7088,13987,3546,3535,1188,73546,6620,1628],"class_list":{"0":"post-513271","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-age","9":"tag-alexander","10":"tag-belle","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-california","13":"tag-care","14":"tag-first-book","15":"tag-gilberg","16":"tag-la","17":"tag-life","18":"tag-los-angeles","19":"tag-losangeles","20":"tag-lot","21":"tag-patient","22":"tag-people","23":"tag-prescription","24":"tag-psychiatry","25":"tag-secret","26":"tag-time","27":"tag-year"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115888297526885098","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=513271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/513271\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/513272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=513271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=513271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=513271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}