IMAGO PUBLISHING COMPANY

The destruction by the Nazis of the Verlag (International Psychoanalytic Press) was a bitter blow to Freud, and when he arrived in London in 1938 he tried to find some way of restoring it.

Already, in May of that year, Hanns Sachs had suggested that he establish a periodical in the Unites States that would be devoted to non-medical applications of psychoanalysis, especially to culture, and to call it the American Imago. In this way Sachs hoped to continue along the path pursued by the original Imago, founded by himself and Otto Rank in 1912, and of which he had remained co-editor. The name "Imago" was taken from the title of a novel by a Swiss poet, Carl Spitteler, that had underlined the importance of the unconscious in its motif, a love affair. According to Ernest Jones, Freud favored the Sachs plan, for which financial backing had been guaranteed by a well-wisher, but was somewhat reluctant to agree to the title, though he quickly gave in, and American Imago remains successful.

Freud was deeply concerned about the loss of his own journals printed in German, as well as the Verlag. He found a sympathetic and gifted writer, poet, and publisher, John Rodker, who founded the Imago Publishing Company (IPC) in London. Rodker's co-directors were Barbara Low and Martin Freud, and the headquarters of the new company were located at 6, Fitzroy Square in London. For a short time in 1939 a combined Zeitschrift and Imago were published in London, but failed to survive the beginning of the Second World War.

Plans had already been made for the publication of a new edition of Freud's collected works, and the Gesammelte Werke were published by the new company and replaced the original Gesammelte Schriften. Its eighteen volumes were undoubtedly a publishing triumph. Individual works by Freud were also published by the IPC in German, of which Aus den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse (later translated as The Origins of Psycho-Analysis (1954) by Eric Mosbacher and James Strachey and edited by Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud and Ernst Kris) was of cardinal importance, containing as it did the most important letters to Fliess on the subject as well as relevant drafts and notes. Other major Freud works published by the IPC in English translation were Three Essays of the Theory of Sexuality (1905d), The Question of Lay Analysis ( 1926e), and On Aphasia (1891b). The publishing house also issued important works by other authors, of which Twins: A Study of Three Pairs of Identical Twins (1952) by Dorothy Burlingham is exemplary. Other publishing arrangements for psychoanalytic books were well established by the time the IPC closed, shortly after its last publication in 1962.

Clifford Yorke

See also: Gesammelte Werke ; Low, Barbara.

Bibliography

Burlingham, Dorothy. (1952). Twins: A study of three pairs of identical twins. London: Imago Publishing Co.

Freud, Sigmund. (1954a). The origins of psycho-analysis: Letters to Wilhelm Fliess, drafts and notes: 1887-1902. (Marie Bonaparte, Anna Freud, and Ernst Kris, Eds.). London: Imago Publishing Co.

Grubrich-Simitis Ilse. (1995). Urbuch der Psychoanalyse. Hundert Jahre Studien über Hysterie von Josef Breuer und Sigmund Freud. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer.