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In the fall of 1942, Gregory Zilboorg delivered a pioneering lecture to the New York Society for Medical History on the subject of the history of Russian psychiatry. When the lecture was published the following year,1 it was the first time that anyone had tried to deal comprehensively with this theme in the English language. Indeed, Zilboorg was attempting to correct an omission in his book, A History of Medical Psychology, which had been published three years earlier, in which the entire topic of psychiatry in Russia had been reduced to a few lines in a footnote.2 Near the end of the lecture on Russian psychiatry, after an extensive discussion of the achievements of Sergei Korsakov, the country's leading psychiatrist at the turn of the 20th century, Zilboorg makes this statement: “while European psychiatry was studying hysteria, revealing a new insight into neurosis, and preparing a new theory of psychopathology, Russian psychiatry seemed in a strange way to neglect the whole field of neuroses, and to concentrate on the neuropathological conditions which were brought into focus by the special social and cultural circumstances in which Russia lived.”3
What Zilboorg is saying is that at the moment when Freud's discoveries in the field of psychoanalysis were gaining influence in Europe, Russian psychiatry remained entirely apart from this important development. There is, in fact, no mention of psychoanalysis in Zilboorg's lecture. This lacuna in Zilboorg's work is repeated in all the major histories of psychoanalysis, including those by Henri Ellenberger and Reuben Fine which are very widely read in this country.4 Although in some ways Zilboorg's neglect of this topic is more difficult