Heinz Hartmann - Life

Life

Hartmann was born to a family known for producing writers and academics. His own father was a professor of history, and his mother was a pianist and sculptor. After completing secondary school he entered the University of Vienna where he received his medical degree in 1920. His interest was in Freudian theories.

The death of Karl Abraham prevented Hartmann from following the training analysis he had envisioned with him, and instead he undertook a first analysis with Sándor Radó. In 1927 he published Grundlagen der Psychoanalyse - The Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis - foreshadowing the theoretical contributions to ego psychology he would later make. He also participated in the creation of a manual of medical psychology.

Sigmund Freud offered him free analysis if he stayed in Vienna just as he was offered a position at the Johns Hopkins Institute. He chose to enter into analysis with Freud and was noted as a shining star amongst analysts of his generation, and a favourite pupil of Freud's.

In 1937, at the Viennese Psychological 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 where he quickly became one of the foremost thinkers of the New York Psychoanalytic Society. He was joined by Ernst Kris and Rudolph Loewenstein, with whom he wrote many articles in what was known as the ego-psychology triumvirate.

In 1945 he founded an annual publication The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child with 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.