Heinz Hartmann

Life

Hartmann was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, in 1894, to a well-known family of writers and academics. One grandfather, Moritz Hartmann, was a noted poet and professor and leader of the revolution of 1848. The other grandfather, Rudolph Chrobak, was a distinguished Viennese surgeon. Heinz Hartmann's own father, Ludo Moritz Hartmann, was a professor of history, an ambassador, and a founder of libraries and adult education. Heinz Hartmann's mother, Grete Hartmann (née Chrobak), was a noted pianist and sculptor. After completing secondary school, Hartmann entered the University of Vienna, where he received his medical degree in 1920. He became a psychiatrist in the Wagner-Jaurregg clinic, did research, and developed an interest in Freud and 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.

Hartmann was offered a full professorship in psychiatry by Adolf Meyer at Johns Hopkins University in the United States, in response to which Freud offered to analyze Hartmann free of charge if he would stay in Vienna. Hartmann chose to stay in Vienna and enter into analysis with Freud and was noted as a shining star amongst analysts of his generation, and a favorite pupil of Freud's.

In 1937, at the Vienna Psychoanalytic 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 Ernst 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.

Hartmann died in 1970 in Stony Point, New York.

Hartmann's mortal remains were buried at the cemetery of the 15th-century chapel of Fex-Crasta in the Val Fex, which is a part of the municipality of Sils im Engadin/Segl, a village in the Swiss canton of Graubünden. His wife Dorothea "Dora", née Karplus (1902–1974), who was a US-American, Austrian-born psychoanalyst as well, found her final resting place at his side. The plaque bears a quote from the roundelay in the novel Thus Spoke Zarathustra by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who spent some summer seasons during the 1880s in nearby Sils-Maria:

"Weh spricht vergeh / Doch alle Lust will Ewigkeit / Will tiefe, tiefe Ewigkeit" ["Woe saith: Hence! Go / But joys all want eternity / "Want deep profound eternity"]