Heinz Hartmann

Heinz Hartmann (; November 4, 1894 – May 17, 1970) was an Austrian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He is considered one of the founders and principal representatives of ego psychology.

Life

Hartmann was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, in 1894, After completing secondary school, Hartmann entered the University of Vienna, where he received his medical degree in 1920. He also participated in the creation of a manual of medical psychology.

Hartmann was offered a full professorship in psychiatry by Adolf Meyer at Johns Hopkins University in the United States, in response to which Freud offered to analyze Hartmann free of charge if he would stay in Vienna. Hartmann chose to stay in Vienna and enter into analysis with Freud and was noted as a shining star amongst analysts of his generation, and a favorite pupil of Freud's.

In 1937, at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, he presented a study on the psychology of ego, a topic on which he would later expand on and which became the foundation for the theoretical movement known as ego-psychology.

In 1938, he left Austria with his family to escape the Nazis. Passing through Paris and then Switzerland, he arrived in New York in 1941

In 1945, he founded an annual publication The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child with Ernst Kris and Anna Freud; while in the 1950s he became the president of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) and after several years of his presidency, he received the honorary title of lifetime president.

Hartmann died in 1970 in Stony Point, New York. which was followed by a number of studies on psychoses, neuroses, twins, etc.

In 1939, Hartmann, in what Otto Fenichel called "a very interesting paper, tried to show that adaptation has been studied too much from the point of view of mental conflict. He points out that there is also a 'sphere without conflict' " – something that would be repeatedly emphasized in ego-psychology. In the same year, in "Psychoanalysis and the Concept of Health", he made an impressive contribution to defining normality and health in psychoanalytic terms.

The subsequent development of ego-psychology within psychoanalysis, with its shift from instinct theory to the adaptive functions of the ego has been seen as allowing psychoanalysis and psychology to move closer to each other. Ego-psychology became in fact the dominant psychoanalytic force in the States for the next half-century or so, before object relations theory began to come to the fore. It formed the basis and starting-point for the self psychology of Heinz Kohut, for example, which both opposed and was rooted in Hartmann's theory of libido.

Criticism

Jacques Lacan focused much of his ire on what he called "'ego psychology' à la Hartmann...as a repudiation of psychoanalysis" – taking issue with its stress on the conflict-free zone of the ego and on adaptation to reality.

Nevertheless, some argue that ego psychology has a genuine Freudian ancestry, even if it cannot be seen as its sole heir.

Select bibliography Heinz Hartmann, Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation (1939) Heintz Hartmann, Essays on Ego Psychology (1964)