Notes on Re-Reading Dr. Hanns Sachs' Last Book

Hanns Sachs, first editor of the American Imago, died in 1947. For several years before his death, he was engaged, in addition to his psychoanalytic practice in Boston, in writing his final book, which he planned to call The People of a Strange Planet, the initials of which (P.S.P.) he came to use when speaking of the book. P.S.P. referred to the people he had known and analyzed (including himself) during his long and useful life (1881-1947). But as fate would have it, he died before this book was ready for publication, so it became the lot of Dr. A. A. Roback to edit the manuscript. Dr. Roback felt justified (for reasons he gives in his introduction, pages 20-21) in changing the title to Masks of Love and Life, under which label Sachs, last manuscript appeared in print in 1948, one year after the Sachs we knew departed this planet for a stranger or less strange one, as the case may be. Through death and transfiguration, Sachs' intellect and his capacity to use words as telling symbols have given his essence to us in a purified form, without the benefit or the distraction of vine leaves. Reading this book is like hearing Sachs talk with a freedom one never could have had while he was alive, due to