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.