Mira Gincburg was born on 13 January 1884[1] to Dr. Rafael Saveliev and Ravka Salmanowa Gordin, a Jewish couple, in Dinaburg, now in Latvia.

[2] Gincburg, as a student of Carl Jung, engaged in analysis of children for some time at the Zürich psychiatric university hospital in 1909.

[3] Joining the Zürich wing of the International Psychoanalytic Association and the Association of Swiss Alien Doctors in 1911, Gincburg presented her analysis of a suicide attempt, contending that suicidal tendencies of a person with schizophrenia might not result directly from the condition itself but from the same factors involved in neurosis.

Following the ideological conflict between Jung and Sigmund Freud, the couple were among the founding members of the Swiss Society for Psychoanalysis (SSPsa) in 1919.

[2] Rising anti-semitism in Switzerland prompted the Oberholzers to move to the United States in 1938, opening a psychoanalytic practice in New York City.