Heinz Hartmann

Hartmann was born in Vienna on 4 November 1894 into a family of Jewish origin. His paternal grandfather was the poet Moritz Hartmann, a figure of the revolution of 1848. His maternal grandfather was the Viennese physician Rudolf Chrobak. His father, Ludo Moritz Hartmann, was a historian who founded public libraries and programmes of adult education, and his mother, Grete Chrobak, was a pianist and sculptor.

He was taught by private tutors until his early teens and then attended public schools. After serving in the First World War he studied medicine at the University of Vienna, where he also heard Max Weber and Freud lecture. He took his medical degree in 1920.

Hartmann then worked at the Psychiatric-Neurological University Clinic in Vienna under Julius Wagner-Jauregg, and he remained there until 1934. His early publications included papers on quinine metabolism, psychiatric work with Paul Schilder and studies of twins. In 1924 he and Stjepan Betlheim published a study of parapraxes in Korsakoff's psychosis that supported Freud's ideas on symbolization experimentally. It has been called a minor classic of experimental psychoanalysis.

He had planned a training analysis with Karl Abraham in Berlin. When Abraham died unexpectedly, Hartmann was analysed instead by Sándor Radó, and in Berlin he wrote his first book, Die Grundlagen der Psychoanalyse³ (1927). Later Adolf Meyer offered him a full professorship at Johns Hopkins University. Freud responded by offering to analyse him without charge if he stayed in Vienna, and Hartmann accepted.

In 1928 he married Dora Karplus (1902–1974), a paediatrician who later became a psychoanalyst. They had two sons, Ernest and Lawrence Hartmann.

Hartmann became an associate member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1925 and a full member in 1927. From 1930 he taught at its training institute, first on the theory of science in psychoanalysis and then as an introduction to the field. In 1933 he joined the society's board. From 1934, when he left the clinic, he worked only as a psychoanalyst and served as a training analyst. In the 1930s he was one of the editors of the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse. Before 1937 he published about two dozen papers, on subjects that included twins, psychoses, neuroses, values and cocaine; among them was "Psychoanalyse und Wertproblem" (1928).

Die Grundlagen der Psychoanalyse is a book of some 190 pages, published in Leipzig by Georg Thieme. It anticipated his later theoretical work on the ego. In a 1974 study R. Heinz read it as an attempt to give psychoanalysis a methodological foundation as a natural science. Heinz argued that its Neo-Kantian caution about treating the unconscious as a real entity left the unconscious only something added in thought. He also saw Hartmann's later ego psychology as a reification of these earlier methodological demands.

On 17 November 1937 Hartmann read to the society the lecture that became Ich-Psychologie und Anpassungsproblem. It was published in the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse in 1939.

After the annexation of Austria in 1938, Hartmann left Vienna with his family. At the invitation of Marie Bonaparte he went first to Paris, where he became a training analyst of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society. He then moved to Switzerland and in 1941 settled in New York.

In New York he became a leading figure of the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. He was a training analyst there and the first director of the institute's treatment centre, which he led from 1948 to 1951. He was president of the society from 1952 to 1954.

In 1945 Hartmann founded the annual The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child with Kris and, in London, Anna Freud. His collaboration with Kris and Loewenstein produced a series of joint papers in the annual, beginning with Comments on the Formation of Psychic Structure⁴ (1946) and continuing with "Notes on the Theory of Aggression" (1949). Hartmann and Loewenstein followed these with "Notes on the Superego" (1962). The three came to be known as the triumvirate of ego psychology, and their joint papers were collected as Papers on Psychoanalytic Psychology (1964). In a survey of Kris's work, David Beres groups the 1946 paper with studies of how the id, ego and superego relate to one another and develop, and of the ego functions, such as defence and sublimation, that adapt the drives to reality.

Hartmann was president of the International Psychoanalytical Association from 1951 to 1957, and in 1959 he was made its honorary president. In the entry he wrote for the International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, his son Lawrence Hartmann describes him as having been "something of a dean of world psychoanalysis" in the mid-twentieth century. Hartmann died at Stony Point, New York, on 17 May 1970. He is buried beside his wife in the cemetery of the chapel of Fex-Crasta, near Sils in the Engadine, Switzerland.

Ich-Psychologie und Anpassungsproblem opens by recalling that psychoanalysis aims to be "eine allgemeine Psychologie im umfassendsten Sinne", a general psychology in the widest sense. It observes that analytic ego psychology had so far been mainly a psychology of conflict. Hartmann took as his starting point Anna Freud's account of the ego's defensive activity, which he called the first exhaustive treatment of an important side of the ego's functioning, and drew many of his examples from her work. He presented his project as taking seriously a widening of the theory of the ego that Freud had already begun in several places, building on Freud's structural model of id, ego and superego.

He gave the provisional name conflict-free ego sphere to the functions that develop outside conflict, such as perception, intention, the comprehension of objects, thinking and language. He did not mean a region of the mind exempt from conflict in principle. He meant the processes that, in a given person, in practice remain outside it. Learning to walk, for example, involves constitution, maturation, learning, libido and identification, and it can be drawn into conflict without having arisen from it. Hartmann insisted that the contrast between development through conflict and peaceful development does not coincide with the contrast between pathological and normal. Healthy people also have conflicts, and a defence that succeeds may still mean an achievement that fails.

The second theme of the paper was adaptation. Hartmann called the ego the individual's specific organ of adaptation. He took Freud's ideas of alloplastic change (altering the environment) and autoplastic change (altering oneself) as guides, and he added a third route, the choice of a new environment. He measured adaptedness against average expectable, typical situations, and he described the normal newborn as adapted from its first day to its average expectable surroundings.

Adaptation in his account also involved the fitting together of functions within the ego, ego strength, and automatisms that equip a person for an average expectable range of tasks. He hoped the concept would help clarify the psychoanalytic notion of mental health, a question he also took up in "Psychoanalysis and the Concept of Health" (1939). In place of Freud's view that the ego grows out of the id, Hartmann proposed that ego and id both differentiate out of a common undifferentiated matrix. This made inborn factors a third influence on the ego's development, beside the drives and the outside world.

From the conflict-free sphere Hartmann developed his account of ego autonomy. He named an area of autonomous ego development in 1939, and in his later papers he distinguished primary from secondary autonomy. Primary autonomy belongs to inborn apparatuses such as perception, memory and motility, which are shaped by maturation and learning but neither derive from conflict nor depend on it to develop. Secondary autonomy belongs to patterns that first arise in conflict, for instance as defences, but through a change of function become stable structures that serve adaptation. Their autonomy is measured by how well they resist being drawn back into the drives through regression. Hartmann stressed that both kinds of autonomy are relative, since autonomous functions can still be caught up in conflict.

In Comments on the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Ego⁵ (1950), Hartmann noted that analysts used the word ego ambiguously. He argued that in the structural theory it should name a psychic system defined by its functions, not the personality or one's own person. For one's own person, as distinct from the surrounding world, he proposed the term self, and he set self-representations beside object representations. On this basis he restated Freud's narcissism as the libidinal investment of the self rather than of the ego.

The same paper introduced the idea of neutralized drive energy, which Hartmann worked out in Notes on the Theory of Sublimation⁶ (1955). There he treated sublimation as a change in the mode of drive energy, away from an instinctual and towards a non-instinctual mode, which places energy at the ego's disposal for its functions. Freud had held that the ego works with desexualized energy, and Hartmann extended this to energy derived from aggression. Neutralization thus works on aggression as well as libido and comes in degrees, and Hartmann treated the capacity to neutralize as a measure of ego strength.

Essays on Ego Psychology gathers these papers together with others on the theory of the drives, the reality principle, the development of the ego concept in Freud's work, schizophrenia, technique, the application of psychoanalysis to the social sciences, and psychoanalysis as a scientific theory. It also reprints early clinical and experimental studies, among them the Korsakoff study and the work on twins.

David Rapaport translated Ich-Psychologie und Anpassungsproblem into English in 1958 as Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation. In the historical survey of psychoanalytic ego psychology he wrote as the introduction to Erik Erikson's Identity and the Life Cycle⁷ (1959), Rapaport treated Hartmann's work as the basis of the field and placed Erikson's psychosocial theory within it. Rapaport also elaborated Hartmann's notion of autonomy into a reciprocal relation between the ego's autonomy from the drives and its autonomy from the environment.

Ego psychology moved the emphasis of psychoanalysis from the drives to the adaptive functions of the ego and brought it closer to academic psychology. It dominated American psychoanalysis until object relations theory rose to prominence. Hartmann's distinction between ego and self became a starting point for later theories. Edith Jacobson's The Self and the Object World⁸ (1964) built on it to trace how self- and object representations form. Heinz Kohut's The Analysis of the Self⁹ (1971) took Hartmann's definition of narcissism as the investment of the self as the step from which his psychology of the self developed. Otto Kernberg's Object Relations Theory and Clinical Psychoanalysis¹⁰ (1976) joined object relations theory to ego psychology by way of the same representations. Lawrence Hartmann's dictionary entry likewise credits his father's work with helping to prepare the way for object relations theory and self psychology.

The school also drew sharp criticism. Across the papers collected in Écrits¹¹ (1966), Lacan attacked the ego psychology of Hartmann, Kris and Loewenstein, arguing that the aim of strengthening an autonomous, adapted ego betrays Freud's discovery of the unconscious. Within ego psychology itself, Marvin Hurvich judges most of Hartmann's ideas on autonomy to have held up. He notes, however, that serious doubts have been raised about the scientific status of the energy transformations assumed by the hypothesis of neutralization.

Hartmann's first book was Die Grundlagen der Psychoanalyse (Leipzig, 1927). His founding statement of ego psychology was Ich-Psychologie und Anpassungsproblem, published in the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse in 1939 and in English as Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation in 1958. With Kris and Loewenstein he wrote Comments on the Formation of Psychic Structure (1946), "Notes on the Theory of Aggression" (1949) and other joint papers, collected in Papers on Psychoanalytic Psychology (1964). His own papers include Comments on the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Ego (1950), "The Mutual Influences in the Development of Ego and Id" (1952), Notes on the Theory of Sublimation (1955) and "Notes on the Reality Principle" (1956). Most of them are collected in Essays on Ego Psychology: Selected Problems in Psychoanalytic Theory (New York, 1964).