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Dr. Hanns Sachs was born on January 10, 1881, and died on January 10, 1947, on his sixty-sixth birthday. An almost chronic invalid from lung trouble, he had been in very poor health for several months, but the end came suddenly.
After graduating from the University of Vienna in 1904 he entered the legal profession, which he practised—without much enthusiasm—until 1918. His real interest at that time was in literature, particularly in its psychological aspects. Stimulated by reading Die Traumdeutung he began to attend Freud's lectures. In his book on Freud he says this was in 1904, but his memory was demonstrably faulty at the time he wrote it and it may be doubted if the date was as early as this. At all events he was not present at the Salzburg Congress in 1908 and it was not until 1910 that he presented himself personally to Freud, bringing with him a little volume he had just published containing translations, incidentally most excellent ones, of Kipling's soldier ballads. In the following year, 1911, he published one of his many contributions to psycho-analysis. In the year after that he became a member of the small group around Freud which he describes in his chapter 'The Seven Rings'; the present writer is the only survivor of this group.
Dr. Sachs was not a voluminous writer, but he never wrote anything that did not have serious value. His writings, listed in the psycho-analytical literature, belong to the best known and most treasured in that corpus. A few of them may be recalled to memory. An early one Uber Naturgefühl clarified the interesting contrasts between the antique and the modern attitude towards nature, the former investing it with personality, the latter with various human affects. Perhaps his most characteristic contributions were in the field of æsthetics. There he made psycho-analytic studies of various writers, notably Schiller,