Imago/American Imago: 1912-2012 Preface

The first issue of Imago, under the editorial direction of Sigmund Freud and co-edited by Otto Rank and Hanns Sachs, appeared in Vienna in March 1912. The journal continued to appear during the First World War and remained active until 1938, when the Anschluss between Nazi Germany and Austria made it impossible to go further as a Viennese publication. In that same year, Sachs recommended to Freud that Imago be revived within the psychoanalytic émigré community in the United States and that Freud serve as one of its editors. Although Freud initially hoped that Imago in exile would remain a German-language publication, he eventually agreed with Sachs' idea for an English-language journal and suggested that it be called American Imago (Sachs, 1944, pp. 182-183). Freud died before the initial issue of the transplanted journal appeared, but Sachs successfully put their project into effect. Now, with the current March 2012 issue, Imago/American Imago has reached its 100^th anniversary.

Throughout its 100 years, the journal has published the work of analysts and authors across the fields of the humanities, arts, and social sciences. It has also published across boundaries determined by war and exile, demonstrating a recurring awareness of the crisis conditions in which it was born and had to exist, and keeping a steady focus on the future of the psychoanalytic movement. The breadth of both its mission and concerns appeared in Imago's first issues, in which Freud published the four essays that became Totem and Taboo (1913 [1912-13]). Those essays directed the attention of the psychoanalytic movement to moments of crisis in history and specifically to the psychological and social meaning of authority, obedience, and revolt at such moments, the question from Totem and Taboo that Stanley Milgram identified as directly relevant to his own seminal study