Lawrence Hartmann

Lawrence Hartmann is an American child and adult psychiatrist, social-psychiatric activist, clinician, professor, and former President of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) Cf 2 below). Hartmann played a central role in the APA's 1973 decision to remove homosexuality as a diagnosis of mental illness from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (cf Drescher 2007, below). This change decisively changed the modern era of LGBTQ rights by providing support for the overturning of laws and prejudices against homosexuals and by advancing gay civil rights, including the right to immigrate, to adopt, to buy a home, to teach, to marry, and to be left alone.

Family and early life Hartmann grew up in New York City. He was born in Vienna, Austria in 1937 into a prominent family of intellectuals, professors, and social reformers. Hartmann's early years were unsettled by the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, and his family's consequent emigration from Vienna to Paris in 1938, to Switzerland in 1939, and to New York City in 1941. His father was Heinz Hartmann (1894–1970), an internationally known psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, as well as a student and analysand of Sigmund Freud's.

Education and academic and clinical career Hartmann was educated at the Fieldston School in New York City and then at Harvard College, where he received a B.A. in History and Literature (magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa). As a Rhodes Scholar, Hartmann earned two degrees in English Literature from Oxford University. He received an M.D. from Harvard Medical School and then served as an intern in pediatrics at the University of California in San Francisco. He served his residency in psychiatry (1965–1967) and a fellowship in child psychiatry (1967–1969) at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center (MMHC), a Harvard Teaching Hospital. He was psychoanalyzed from 1966 until 1971. Upon completion of his training, Hartmann began a private practice with adults, adolescents, and children; ran a child and adolescent psychiatry clinic and a school consultation program; and, for about 50 years, taught, and served as a clinical professor of psychiatry, at Harvard Medical School, mostly at MMHC and later mostly at Cambridge Hospital. He has written on such topics as child psychotherapy, dirty words, ethics, play, apartheid, torture, skepticism, and biopsychosocial integration.

Selected bibliography

Hartmann, L. & Hanson, G. (1986), Child psychotherapy. In: Current Psychiatric Therapies, ed. J. Masserman. New York: Grune and Stratton, pp. 29–43.

{Hartmann, L. (1992a), Some social psychiatric problems in Chile, South Africa and the Soviet Union. In: Psychiatry and World Accords, ed. J. Masserman. New York, Gardner, pp. 5–15.

Doerr-Zegers, Otto; Hartmann, Lawrence; Lira, Elizabeth; Weinstein, Eugenia. (1992b). "Torture : Psychiatric Sequelae and Phenomenology". Psychiatry 55 (2) : 177-184. doi:10 1080/0032747. 1992, 11024591 PMID 1603893 .

Hanson, G. & Hartmann, L. (1996), Latency development in prehomosexual boys. In: Textbook of Homosexuality and Mental Health, ed. R.P. Cabaj & T.S. Stein. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, pp. 253–266. Hartmann, L. (1996), Foreword. In: Textbook of Homosexuality and Mental Health, ed. R.P. Cabaj & T.S. Stein. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, pp. xxv–xxxi.

Hartmann, L. (2001), "Confidentiality". In Ethics Primer of the American Psychiatric Association, ed. D. Langsley. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press, pp. 39–45.

Hartmann, Lawrence (2025) : De-Pathologizing Homosexuality, 50th Anniversary Notes on December, 1973. Psychoanalytic Inquiry, June 10, 2025, vol 45 #6, pp505–511, DOI: 101080/07351690.2025.2508670