Hanns Sachs 1881–1947

We are assembled today in honor of the memory of a friend, scientist, teacher, whose loss the Psychoanalytic Society of Boston sincerely deplores. On the morning of January 10th, on his 66th birthday, Hanns Sachs didn't take his pen again to continue writing, the typewriter of hia faithful sister, Olga, stopped ticking, and his nephew, the lawyer-artist, didn't get any more the guiding advice of his uncle. His students in midst of their training were deprived of their analyst.

Hanns Sachs was aware of the nearness of his death, but he didn't stop working. He followed the example of his beloved teacher, Freud, whom he helped building up the analytic edifice for more than 30 years, since he had met him in 1904. At that time, Hanns Sachs was a lawyer like his father who came from the Sudeten country, then a part of the Hapsburg monarchy, a country where the Jews were the ardent fighters for German culture, wishing, dreaming and thinking that they were one of them. Hanns had been bred in this dream-world from infancy, a world of beauty which one can find only in art and poetry, in the all-embracing world of aesthetics—the aesthetics which concerns the relation of intuition to expression and the manner of the transition from the one to the other—the aesthetics, of which art is the very mediator, because it arises from pure intuition, pure of all critical references to reality or unreality of these images, of which it is woven. Artistic thinking and feeling was the spirit of the family, in which Hanns grew up. An older sister wrote novels, and his 12-year old older brother, Otto, wrote plays. Otto's interest in dreams and in the meaning of dreams was well known in the family. This interest he expressed before Freud's dream theory was published. Otto died when Hanns was 16 years old. It was Hanns, the artist, who had already translated some ballads of Kipling, and who then was fascinated by Freud's dream interpretation which influenced

Address delivered at the Sachs Memorial