HARTMANN, HEINZ

HARTMANN, HEINZ (1894–1970), psychoanalyst. Hartmann, who was born in Vienna, was a leading theoretician in psychoanalysis and a pioneer in the field of psychoanalytic ego psychology. In 1939 he published his paper Ich-Psychologie und Anpassungsproblem, translated into English in 1958 as Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation. Like Anna *Freud, he emphasized the activities of that psychic construct, the ego, as no less important than that of the drives, the id. He pointed out the importance of man's adapting to an "average expectable environment" as a function of the ego. In the same paper, he defined the "conflict-free sphere of the ego" – where patterns of behavior develop independently of unconscious intrapsychic conflict; they do so either, primarily, through inborn autonomous ego functions or, secondarily, by gaining autonomy from the conflicts which helped bring them about. A student of Freud, Hartmann amplified and elaborated numerous aspects of psychoanalytic theory, including the relation of intrapsychic events and of psychoanalysis to the environment, to society, and to the social sciences. He emigrated to Switzerland in 1938 and in 1941 settled in the United States. He served as president of the International and New York Psychoanalytic Associations (1951–57 and 1952–54 respectively). In 1959 he was made honorary president of the International Association.

bibliography:

L. Eidelberg (ed.), Encyclopedia of Psychoanalysis (1968), index; A. Grinstein, Index of Psychoanalytic Writings, 2 (1957) 7 (1964); R.M. Loewenstein, in: F. Alexander et al., Psychoanalytic Pioneers (1966), 469–83, includes bibliography.

[Rafael Moses]