Education
He graduated from Marshall High School in Chicago’s West Side and proceeded to obtain bachelor’s and medical degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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Jerome Kavka
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From the early 1990s until 2006, he also served as archivist for the Institute. As a young intern at Saint Elizabeth"s Hospital in Washington, District of Columbia, immediately after World World War II, Kavka treated poet Ezra Pound. Kavka’s observations, made over a four-month period, ultimately led to a successful insanity plea by Pound, something that helped the poet avoid a possible death sentence for treason.
Kavka has written widely on Pound"s psychological condition, and his writings are considered important in Pound scholarship.
Kavka’s internship was cut short when he was drafted as a physician into the United States Army, but after his service he completed his residency at the Cook County Hospital. In 1966, he joined the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis as training and supervising analyst.
According to The Chicago Tribune obituary, he was “known for his original and often unconventional wisdom and for his capacity to work outside the classic psychoanalytic mold.”
Kavka was married to Georgine Rotman Kavka Doctor of Medicine (1922–1996), a psychiatrist and professorial lecturer in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Chicago.
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Quotations: “quite crazy, but Jerry, who was Jewish, managed still to talk to him,”.
Membership
He is the father of the late Gregory South. Kavka, a political philosopher, and Audrey Kavka, Doctor of Medicine, a San Francisco Bay area psychoanalyst and member of San Francisco Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.
