Preface

Heisenberg: A touch of Elsinore there, perhaps.

Bohr: Elsinore?

Heisenberg: The darkness inside the human soul.

By inaugurating my editorship of American Imago with a special issue devoted to “The Significance of Psychoanalysis for the Human Sciences,” I mean to look both to the past and to the future. In 1913, one year after the founding of the original German-language Imago, Hanns Sachs and Otto Rank jointly published a monograph with this title. Sachs, of course, cofounded American Imago with Freud in 1939 and became this journal's first editor until 1946, the year before his death. Sachs was followed by George Wilbur until 1963; and when, in 1964, Harry Slochower became Editor-in-Chief, he began his quarter-century tenure by reprinting the text of Rank and Sachs in its entirety.

Slochower, however, rendered the German Geisteswissenschaften as “Humanities,” while I have preferred “Human Sciences.” In this modification, I signal the direction I hope to take the journal in the future. The term “human sciences” is at once venerable and contemporary. It evokes the contrast in hermeneutic theory between the human or historical sciences, on one hand, and the natural sciences, on the other. The term is thus at least approximately synonymous with “the humanities” and captures the abiding concern of American Imago with the relations between psychoanalysis and culture in all its aspects. But there is both an elasticity and a rigor to the notion of “human sciences” that is lacking in “humanities.” For in postulating an antinomy between the realms of “human” and “natural” science, the term paradoxically also brings them into conjunction. Must the human