Hanns Sachs—1881–1947

On January 10, 1947, Hanns Sachs died. He was one of the very few remaining from the original circle of Freud's pupils. His passing was a blow to his family, to his friends, to his colleagues and to his students. He died on his sixty-sixth birthday, having suffered the past few years from an illness which he, in the full knowledge of its inevitable outcome, faced quietly and courageously. Although seriously handicapped physically during these years, intellectually and spiritually he was as alert as ever. Death surprised him in the midst of an important creative work, parts of which I fear will remain irretrievably lost, but some of which I hope we may be permitted to know.

Hanns Sachs was born in Vienna and studied law in that city. In 1904, he became acquainted with psychoanalysis by reading Freud's Interpretation of Dreams. The facts and theories revealed there interested him so tremendously that he attended lectures given by Freud at the Psychiatric Clinic. From then, psychoanalysis determined the course of his life, although for several years it was for him a hobby—though a very important one—as he was a practicing lawyer. Gradually it assumed greater importance than his own profession, and from 1919 psychoanalysis became his lifework. He became the first training analyst when in 1920 he was asked by the newly founded Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute to start and develop the important function of analyzing future psychoanalysts, some of them already practicing. He was one of a small group of analysts who had to learn by trial and error the intricacies of the unknown field of training analysis. He remained in Berlin until 1932 when he was invited by the Harvard School of Medicine to become a training analyst in Boston, a function