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  • Imago/American Imago: 1912–2012 Preface
  • Louis Rose

The first issue of Imago, under the editorial direction of Sigmund Freud and co-edited by Otto Rank and Hanns Sachs, appeared in Vienna in March 1912. The journal continued to appear during the First World War and remained active until 1938, when the Anschluss between Nazi Germany and Austria made it impossible to go further as a Viennese publication. In that same year, Sachs recommended to Freud that Imago be revived within the psychoanalytic émigré community in the United States and that Freud serve as one of its editors. Although Freud initially hoped that Imago in exile would remain a German-language publication, he eventually agreed with Sachs’ idea for an English-language journal and suggested that it be called American Imago (Sachs, 1944, pp. 182–183). Freud died before the initial issue of the transplanted journal appeared, but Sachs successfully put their project into effect. Now, with the current March 2012 issue, Imago/American Imago has reached its 100th anniversary.

Throughout its 100 years, the journal has published the work of analysts and authors across the fields of the humanities, arts, and social sciences. It has also published across boundaries determined by war and exile, demonstrating a recurring awareness of the crisis conditions in which it was born and had to exist, and keeping a steady focus on the future of the psychoanalytic movement. The breadth of both its mission and concerns appeared in Imago’s first issues, in which Freud published the four essays that became Totem and Taboo (1913 [1912–13]). Those essays directed the attention of the psychoanalytic movement to moments of crisis in history and specifically to the psychological and social meaning of authority, obedience, and revolt at such moments, the question from Totem and Taboo that Stanley Milgram identified as directly relevant to his own seminal study [End Page 1] of obedience to authority (1974, p. 113). But those same four essays also confronted the question of loss and reflected upon the mortal obstacles and vicissitudes—internal and external—that attached to humanity’s deepest personal and social strivings. Fittingly, having published Totem and Taboo in Imago in the journal’s earliest years, Freud revisited the work’s central themes in the opening two essays of Moses and Monotheism (1939 [1934–38]), which he published in the journal in 1937, during the last year of its Viennese existence, before he was forced to find refuge in London.

Imago came into existence only two years before the outbreak of the First World War. It was present at the collapse of the centuries-old European continental empires. And it experienced the hope-filled creations and troubled lives of the new Central European republics, Austria and Germany chief among them. In Vienna, an author of the constitution of Austria’s First Republic and member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Hans Kelsen (1922), published a social psychological theory of state formation in Imago, and Erich Fromm (1931) published a psychological and social analysis of crime and punishment in the postwar world. Outlining future directions for psychoanalytic theory and practice, Melanie Klein’s works on child analysis (1923 and 1926) and Erik Erikson’s early contribution on traumatic configurations in children’s play (1937) appeared in the Viennese Imago. There too the art historian and psychoanalyst Ernst Kris—also an editor of the journal—moved psychoanalysis into the academic fields of art history and image studies through the project on caricature that he pursued with his friend and colleague E. H. Gombrich (1934). Such directions, however, became swept up by the events that surrounded the analysts in Europe, and as the decade of the 1930s reached its deepest moment of crisis, Thomas Mann (1936) published his somber contemplation of Freud and the future in Imago’s pages.

In the United States at the start of the Second World War, in one of the first issues of American Imago, the German émigré analyst and Marxian thinker Otto Fenichel (1939/1940) interpreted the nature of the political anti-Semitism that had undermined the new European republics, contributed to the rise of fascism, and forced psychoanalysts into exile. Yet, even in [End...

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