Preface

In Vienna, two years before the First World War, Sigmund Freud founded Imago as a journal for the application of psychoanalysis to the humanities, arts, and social sciences. When in the 1930s the spread of fascism forced the psychoanalytic movement from the European continent, one of its original editors, Hanns Sachs, re-established the journal in Boston as American Imago. We are now entering Imago's centenary year. As a historian of Vienna and psychoanalysis, and in common with the journal's readers, I am moved and inspired by a legacy of publication and editorial commitment that endured throughout the twentieth century and continued into our own.

From the beginning, Imago reflected Freud's conception of psychoanalysis as a cultural and intellectual movement. Freud inaugurated the journal with his four essays on Totem and Taboo and soon published in its pages his study of the Moses of Michelangelo and his post-1914 reflections on war and death. In those works, written within a short span of three years, he responded to core realities of the twentieth century: the tenacity and defensiveness of systems of social and cultural authority, the expanding reality and impact of visual culture and communication, and the rapid growth and increasing destructiveness of the state's war-making powers. This issue of American Imago centers on the last theme, one that Freud revisited throughout his life: the presence and experience of war in modern society.

Imago was one of the first scholarly and professional journals to view its purpose as multidisciplinary, and the essays in this issue explore the culture and consequences of war through that lens. They integrate the perspectives of clinical practice and historical analysis, social theory and cultural criticism, classical studies and media research. They examine how unacknowledged aggression has become fused with the art market in the most recent decade of war; how the social trauma of warfare and civil conflict has led communities