Sigmund Freud
Trained as a neurologist, Freud developed psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychoses, after studying with the French hypnosis and hysteria expert, Jean-Martin Charcot, from 1885-1886. Freud published his ground-breaking The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899, and, by 1902, he had acquired several followers who formed the Wednesday Psychological Society – later known as the Viennese Analytic Society – a weekly gathering in which physicians discussed psychoanalysis. Regarded as the father of psychoanalysis, his monumental works include Civilization and Its Discontents and Beyond the Pleasure Principle. With his students and colleagues, Freud not only shaped the future of psychoanalysis, but the very consciousness of modernity.
Sachs was a lawyer who, after attending Freud’s university lectures, joined his Wednesday Psychological Society in 1910, thereafter presenting papers on psychoanalysis, edited the magazine Imago, helped train analysts including Erich Fromm and, beginning in 1920, practiced psychoanalysis in Berlin. Freud cited Sachs’ work in his own writing and, in 1944, Sachs published his biography Freud: Master and Friend.
In 1927, German neurologist and psychoanalyst Ernst Simmel established the world’s first inpatient psychoanalytic clinic at Berlin’s Schloss Tegel. Simmel’s treatment of battlefield neuroses had already come to Freud’s attention after World War I, influencing Freud’s 1921 book Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, and he occasionally visited the clinic before its financial collapse and closure (likely, in part, due to growing Nazi threats) in 1931. Interestingly, Freud’s youngest son, Ernst, an architect, designed the clinic’s interiors and furniture. “The setting in the Tegel sanatorium is the only one known to us in which [Ernst] Freud designed a couch and a chair that were made-to-measure for psychoanalysis,” (“The Architecture of Psychoanalysis: The consulting rooms of Ernst Freud,” Cabinet, Welter).
Our boldly signed letter highlights Freud’s interest and support of the psychoanalytic clinic in Schloss Tegel, and he likely wrote this letter in English so that Sachs could show it to potential non-German speaking financial supporters.
Folded into quarters with an intersecting fold tear in the center. Show-through from tape repairs on the verso. Some staining and wear but otherwise in very good condition. Framed and not examined out of the frame.
