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Franz Alexander - the focus of this book - was one of the most significant figures in the dissemination of psychoanalysis in the United States. He established the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis in 1932; his manifold activities included research, teaching, writing and clinical work. He strove to integrate psychoanalysis and medicine and is best known for being the founder of psychosomatic medicine, but he also worked in the field of criminology (applying a psychodynamic approach), elaborated new psychoanalytic techniques (short-term therapy) and concepts (like ‘corrective emotional experience’), as well as contributing to psychiatric historiography. He was simultaneously receptive and inventive, traditional and modern, highly successful, even celebrated, and also strongly criticized and partly forgotten.
The genre of this book is rather unusual, being a mixture of (auto)biography, professional history, social history and family history. The author is the granddaughter of the protagonist of the book, a clinical social worker and psychotherapist herself. Her book is not only a history of Alexander the prominent psychoanalyst, but also that of ‘Big Papa’. A main motivation for its (long-cherished) writing is the recent revelation of the grandfather's, and thus the author's, Jewish origin. This provides an additional, significant layer of the book, running throughout the chapters from the assimilation of the great-grandfather (philosopher and aesthete Bernard Alexander), through partly externally forced denial and concealment in the next generation, to the shift from the grandchildren's complete ignorance of their Jewish heritage to the new-found identity and family of the author. This individual and transgenerational family history is a typical collective story, and trauma, of twentieth-century Eastern Europe. The author's further personal trauma involved separation from her father, including his total ‘elimination’ and a resulting distortion of family memories, as