The Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis

Heinz Hartmann's first book, of some 190 pages, was published in Leipzig by Georg Thieme in 1927. He wrote it in Berlin while he was in analysis with Sándor Radó. It examines the foundations of psychoanalysis, moving from a long introduction to a section on the theory of the drives. It discusses causal explanation and understanding (Verstehen), introspection and natural-scientific method, refers among others to Karl Jaspers and Max Weber, and takes up questions of value and norms. In a 1974 study in Psyche, R. Heinz read the book as an attempt to give psychoanalysis a methodological foundation as a natural science, and he judged that this attempt shaped later psychoanalytic theory. In his account, the book's Neo-Kantian critique of treating the unconscious as an entity leaves the unconscious only as something added in thought. Heinz also held that the book shields the validity of norms from psychoanalysis by confining it to the question of how norms arise. Finally, he read Hartmann's later ego psychology as a reification of these earlier methodological demands. The book has been described as anticipating Hartmann's later contributions to ego psychology.