Freud made his first contact with the United States when he traveled to Clark University to lecture on psychoanalysis in 1909. Upon his return to Austria, Freud founds American Imago’s predecessor, Imago, as a journal for the application of psychoanalysis to the humanities, arts, and social sciences. It is one of the first multidisciplinary journals. 

Freud inaugurates the journal with the publication of the four essays of Totem and Taboo, exploring the origins of social organization, religious belief, state authority, and political rebellion.

Hanns Sachs and Otto Rank serve as Imago’s first editors. In this period, Rank authors The Myth of the Birth of the Hero and The Incest Theme in Literature and Legend, and he and Sachs co-write The Significance of Psychoanalysis for the Mental Sciences. Later, Sachs will publish Freud, Master and Friend, his memoir of Freud and Viennese psychoanalysis.

Photo: Sigmund Freud, G. Stanley Hall, C.G. Jung, A.A. Brill, Ernest Jones, and Sándor Ferenczi posed at Clark University, Worcester, Massaschusetts in 1909

In Volume 3, Freud publishes his study of visual art, “The Moses of Michelangelo.”

Photo: Michelangelo’s Moses

The First World War begins.  Imago continues to publish amidst the conflict. In its pages, Freud takes on both cultural and political topics.

The Habsburg Empire collapses, leading to the creation of the First Austrian Republic.

One of the first to experiment with psychoanalytic techniques on children, Melanie Klein contributes a piece on child analysis.

Erich Fromm, pioneer of political psychology, begins to make contributions to Imago on religion and on criminal justice.

Photo: Erich Fromm

Ernst Kris, an editor of Imago and author of a study of caricature published in its pages in 1934, organizes a Viennese exhibition of the artwork and caricatures of the 19th-century French artist Honoré Daumier, a critic of authoritarianism; it is the only exhibition of Daumier’s art outside of France in the 1930s. 

Photo: An Honoré Daumier political cartoon commenting on the Portuguese dynastic affair of 1828

Nobel Prize laureate Thomas Mann contributes a piece on Freud and the future.

The Anschluss occurs in March, and Austria is officially annexed by Nazi Germany. Adolf Eichmann directs his policy toward Jews in Vienna, and Kristallnacht takes place in Germany in November. 

With the spread of Nazism and fascism, and with the approach of war, Imago is suppressed in Europe and Freud is convinced to flee to London.