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Black Hamlet is a pioneering study that used psychoanalytic methods and insights to understand the intricate relations between an individual and his society. It gave the lie to the myth, still lingering, that psychoanalysis is narrowly confined to the intense scrutiny of individual emotional states within the ‘Western’ individualistic nuclear family.
was an orthodox psychoanalyst, analysed by Theodor Reik in Berlin. In the unpromising racist and turbulent South Africa of the 1920s, where he emigrated with his family in 1922, he undertook many adventurous, indeed dangerous, attempts to understand how an ‘ordinary’ African felt and thought in everyday life. Sachs was unusual but not unique among analysts. In 1920, even that paragon of classical psychoanalysis, Karl Abraham, declared that ‘psychoanalysis is not limited to the individual's mental life, it reveals novel and remarkable insights into human organization: family, state, people’ (Abraham 1965, p. 177). Sachs was originally a physician. He had neither the skills nor the training of the anthropologist Roheim. Nor did he belong to the culture of the individual with whom (and his family and friends) he was working. Nevertheless Sachs crossed ‘race’, cultural, educational and linguistic barriers to reach emotionally and understand John Chavafambira—the Black Hamlet of his original and still topical book.
In one of the few obituaries of Sachs it was sympathetically observed that Sachs' ‘interests turned largely to social questions; he was certainly on the left wing…. He had seen much political confusion in his time, in Petrograd and, lastly, in South Africa, and was less frightened of change than others who in the presence of political confusion had chiefly their own qualms’ (Rickman 1950, p. 289). Rickman also commented on Sachs' inner conflicts between the ‘thoughtful investigator and the revolutionary [that] though it may have enriched his personality blunted his perceptions as a scientist’ (Rickman 1950, p. 289)