Hanns Sachs

Hanns Sachs (Vienna, 1881 – Boston, 1947) was one of the earliest psychoanalysts and a close personal friend of Sigmund Freud. Trained in law, he practised as a lawyer in Vienna before devoting himself fully to psychoanalysis, and his name is linked to Freud's inner circle from the discipline's early years.

Sachs began attending Freud's lectures after reading "The Interpretation of Dreams" and joined the Wednesday Psychological Society around 1910. From 1912 he co-edited, with Otto Rank, the journal Imago, devoted to applying psychoanalysis to the human sciences, and he belonged to Freud's Secret Committee. He worked in Berlin between 1920 and 1932, training several analysts there, and emigrated to the United States as the threat of National Socialism grew. In Boston he founded American Imago in 1939.

His most original contributions lie in psychoanalytic literary and art theory. In "The Community of Daydreams" (1920) he argued that sharing fantasies relieves feelings of guilt, and his study of Caligula described shifting, unstable identifications. He also worked on the female superego and on the links between film and psychoanalysis. His affectionate memoir of Freud, published in 1945, is still widely cited.