Sachs, Hanns (1881-1947)

SACHS, HANNS (1881-1947)

The Austrian psychoanalyst and doctor of law Hanns Sachs was born on January 10, 1881 in Vienna and died on January 10, 1947 in Boston.

Sachs was the son of a Jewish lawyer whose family roots were in Bohemia. After studying law at the University of Vienna, he earned his doctorate in 1904 and began to practice as a lawyer.

The same year was marked by the determining experience of his life, his reading of Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), which made a very strong impression on him. He made contact with Freud and, in 1909, was admitted to the Wednesday society. He then participated in the "Committee," the limited circle of the first psychoanalysts around Freud.

Sachs had artistic and literary gifts. He translated Rudyard Kipling's poems into German, and had a sustained interest in the possibilities of applying the views and methods of psychoanalysis to cultural phenomena. Together with Otto Rank, with whom he was closely linked until Rank's break with Freudian psychoanalysis, he published The Significance of Psychoanalysis for the Mental Sciences (1913), and co-directed the journal Imago, created the previous year, whose title Sachs himself had chosen with reference to Carl Spitteler's 1906 novel.

In 1918 Sachs abandoned his legal practice to become a professional analyst in Zürich. In 1920 he became a training analyst at the Berliner Psychoanalystiches Institut (BPI; Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute) headed by Karl Abraham. The analysts who trained with him included, notably, Franz Alexander, Michael Balint, Erich Fromm, Rudolf Löwenstein, and Karen Horney. In 1932, anticipating the full magnitude of political developments, he left Germany and emigrated to the United States. He taught at the Harvard Medical School in Boston, where he was one of the few analysts without a degree in medicine. Despite his authority as a training analyst in the Boston Psychoanalytic Society (BoPS), and despite the esteem in which he was held as someone close to Freud, his role was not universally accepted, mainly because of the issue of lay analysis. In 1939, following in the footsteps of the Austrian journal, he founded American Imago, which is still published today. He died on January 10, 1947, on his sixty-sixth birthday, in Boston.

Sachs always showed himself to be a loyal disciple of Freud. His Freud: Master and Friend (1944) presents a portrait of Freud that is dominated by loyalty, respect, and sympathy. In his presentations on clinical analysis, dealing with various themes, he always remained within the framework of Freudian theory. In works intended for the general public, such as Zur Menschenkenntnis: Ein psypsychoanalytischer Wegweiser für den Umgang mit sich selbst und anderen (Contribution to the knowledge of man: psychoanalytic guide to relations with oneself and others, 1936), he attempted to popularize psychoanalysis. He and Abraham advised Georg Wilhelm Pabst on Mysteries of a Soul (1926), a cinematic translation of Freud's world and ideas. Sachs took an interest in all realms—political, social, cultural, and, in particular, literary—whose understanding he believed could be enhanced by psychoanalysis. He wrote essays on Otto von Bismarck, the psychoanalysis of films, and kitsch. In 1930 he published a historical psychoanalysis of the Roman emperor Caligula, entitled Bubi Caligula (Little Caligula). He was also interested in Shakespeare, Schiller, and Baudelaire, among others.

In Gemeinsame Tagträume (Collective daydreams), published in 1924, Sachs developed a remarkable theory of literary creation that even today remains under-appreciated. Its argument is as follows: The determining factor is not talent or the individual effort of the artist, but rather the social character of the work. Sachs saw literary production first and foremost as a social performance: Literature, he argued, creates a social bond in the form of a recognized discourse, in which the unconscious and the repressed, which cannot express themselves otherwise, come into language. The condition for this is the literary form of the work of art, which he interpreted as a social compromise in which repressed instinctual needs are worked through. This theory of the work of art as a collective daydream was further reworked in his later works. His last book, Masks of Love and Life, published posthumously in 1948, broadens these conceptions by considering philosophical problems in the light of psychoanalysis.

Reiner Wild

See also: American Imago; Applied psychoanalysis and the interaction of; Berliner Psychoanalystisches Institut; Cinema criticism; Cinema and psychoanalysis; Germany, history of psychoanalysis in; Imago. Zeitschrift für die Anwendung der Psychoanalyse ; Imago Publishing Company; Secrets of a Soul ; Visual arts and psychoanalysis; Secret Committee; Sociéte psychanalytique de Paris and Institut de psychanalyse; Training analysis; Wiener psychoanalytische Vereinigung; World War I.

Bibliography

Moellenhoff, Fritz. (1966). Hanns Sachs, 1881-1947: the creative unconscious. In Psychoanalytic pioneers. (F. Alexander, S. Eisenstein, and M. Grotjahn, Eds.) New York and London: Basic Books.

Sachs, Hanns. (1924). Gemeinsame tagträume. Berlin, Leipzig, and Vienna: Internationaler psychoanalytischer Verlag.

——. (1942). The creative unconscious: Studies in the psychoanalysis of art. Cambridge, MA: Sci-Arts Publishers.

——. (1948). Masks of love and life: The philosophical basis of psychoanalysis. (A. A. Roback, Ed.) Cambridge, MA: Sci-Arts Publishers.

Sachs, Hanns, and Otto Rank. (1916). The significance of psychoanalysis for the mental sciences. (Charles R. Payne, Trans.) New York: Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Co.