Joseph Wortis was born in Brooklyn, New York, one of five children of Jewish immigrant parents (his father Russian-Jewish, his mother Alsatian-Jewish). He attended New York University, where he majored in English literature before switching to pre-med. He graduated in 1927. Accepted into Yale medical school, he went instead to Europe and studied medicine in Vienna (1927-32), Munich and Paris.[1][2]
Career
Upon returning to the United States, Wortis became a psychiatric resident at Bellevue hospital in New York. In 1934 he married Helen Zunser, the daughter of a prominent New York Jewish literary family. In the same year, funded by a fellowship sponsored by the EnglishpsychologistHavelock Ellis, whom Wortis had met while vacationing in England in 1927. His first act in the fellowship was to travel to Vienna to spend 4 months in psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud. He then studied in Vienna and London until 1940.[1][2] He published a book about this experience in 1954.[3]