In no measure hagiographical, this biography of Gregory Zilboorg-- from his birth in Tsarist Russia in 1890 through his death in New York City in 1959-- treats within the diverse contexts of his time the man Stephen Becker called 'a Russian Jew of intellectual distinction”, “a brilliant, eclectic man” whose “glitter was not superficial' but who nevertheless “had flaws by the standards of his society.”[Becker, Marshall Field III, 134-135].

Born in Kiev, Zilboorg grew up in the Russian Pale struggling for an education limited by Jewish quotas. He studied Law and Medicine, specializing in psychiatry at Petrograd’s Neuropsychological Institute. During the First World War, he served as a doctor on the Eastern Front and, during the Revolution, as secretary to the Labour Minister under the provisional government. When the socialists were overthrown in late 1917, Zilboorg sought refuge in Kiev and worked as a journalist until the city was invaded by both German and Communist troops. Shortly before the Armistice, he fled again, under threat of arrest, across war-torn Europe. Lecturing in French on the socialist experiment in Russia, he spent several months in Holland before departing for New York in early 1919.

Zilboorg initially earned his living by lecturing on revolution, war and contemporary theatre and by translating Russian literature. As a new immigrant during America's 'First Red Scare' and under threat of deportation as a socialist, he married soon after his arrival and, an ardent pacifist, in 1922 joined the Society of Friends. He retrained as a doctor at Columbia University, received his American M.D. in 1926 followed by psychiatric residency at Bloomingdale Hospital. At this time he began regular visits to Mexico, where his brother and parents had settled. In 1928-1929, during Weimar’s last hopeful years, he underwent analysis with Freud’s disciple Franz Alexander at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. Zilboorg struggled to establish himself within the professional, political, ethical and personal contexts of the formative years of international psychoanalytic theory and practice.

In 1932, the year that Gregory Zilboorg with three other psychoanalysts founded the Psychoanalytic Quarterly in New York, Ernest Jones discussed with Freud concerns about an American periodical in competition with the British journal of the London-based International Psychoanalytical Association: 'Your inference that the Americans do not feel related to England I should modify by saying this is only true of the foreigners recently arrived in America, who have lost their own civilisation and not acquired any other. Zilboorg, who is a completely wild Russian, is the real centre of this piece of activity. I admire his energy, but wish it could be somewhat directed and controlled.' [Ernest Jones to Sigmund Freud, 13 June 1932, The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, 1908-1939, ed. R. Andrew Paskauskas and Riccardo Steiner, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993, 701].