Celebrating Eighty Years of American Imago

Early last year, Anton Kris initiated a discussion between my predecessor, Louis Rose, and me about bringing American Imago back to its original American home in Boston. Hanns Sachs and Sigmund Freud had agreed in 1939 that the European Imago, begun in 1912, could find refuge from Nazi persecution here. I became the journal's seventh editor in anticipation of American Imago's eightieth anniversary, which arrives with this issue. Eighty years of continuous publication is certainly cause for celebration, though we had not anticipated the ominous similarities between the present conditions in the United States—the rising tide of authoritarian cruelties and racial conflict—and the conditions which prompted the journal's migration.

That American Imago has maintained its identity as a journal of “Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences” through many turbulent times underscores the dedication and responsibility of its contributors, its editors, and its readers. I am especially grateful to our Associate Editors, our Editorial Board, our Advisory Committee at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and our tireless managing editor, Melissa Skepko. The Johns Hopkins University Press and Project MUSE have continued to provide the best possible support and encouragement for a scholarly publication dedicated to global dialogues between psychoanalysis and the arts and sciences.

Throughout these eighty years, American Imago has remained true to Freud's ideal of psychoanalytic education in The Question of Lay Analysis , which he hoped would encompass “the history of civilization, mythology, the psychology of religion and the science of literature.” The journal's first American volume in 1939-40 contained a fascinating multi-disciplinary array of papers, many written by prominent psychoanalysts of the time, including Hanns Sachs on Shakespeare's “Measure for Measure,” Ernest Jones' “Funeral