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America became the refuge for European analysts who had been disinherited and exiled by the Nazis. Even before, and as far back as the time after World War I, a small group of analysts had visited Vienna and returned with enthusiasm after meeting Freud and learning of the promise of a new treatment for mental illness. One of those fleeing Europe was the Russian Gregory Zilboorg who would eventually make his own mark in psychoanalytic history. He had tremendous intellect, and his commanding presence and countenance was hard to discount. His gift of languages mixed easily with lecturing and teaching. His love of stage, any stage, including the stage of psychoanalysis, combined with his love of lecturing, made time with him memorable. His work on suicide is noteworthy but his major contribution may be his work on the History of Medical Psychology (1941) as well as his editing of the volume celebrating the centenary of the American Psychiatric Association in 1944, One Hundred Years of American Psychiatry. Overall, Zilboorg could be considered the one who combined history, psychiatry and psychoanalysis to form a broader framework of humanistic theory in his writings.
This two-volume biography of Gregory Zilboorg, written by his daughter, a distinguished literary and historical scholar, is nothing short of an extraordinarily intimate and well researched reflective—the story of one man's personal and professional development and life-long contributions to medicine, drama, psychology and psychoanalysis. The author has painstakingly researched her family's archives, most were collected and catalogued by her mother, and has produced a two-volume offering that is scholarly yet reads like a novel. Through diaries and other writings, we are privy to Zilboorg's thoughts as he navigates his life, from early childhood to the Russian Revolution, his early education, his interest in poetry and drama, his talent for languages, and the move to America where he clashes with early psychoa