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Heinz Hartmann's latest book gives us his major essays over the past thirty years. Some of them appear here for the first time in English translation. An introduction presents a concatenation of his basic categories.
Three of Hartmann's contributions may be singled out:
Following Freud, psychology is seen in its broader compass, as the science of over-all human behavior; that is, not only in its pathological, but—a point often obscured—in its normal manifestation. Hartmann's 1956 essay on “The Development of the Ego-Concept in Freud's Work” develops this idea.
Psychology is treated in its relation to the natural environment and to socio-collective behavior. This point is taken up in the essays on “Psychoanalysis and Sociology” and “Application of Psychoanalytic Concepts to Social Change” .
Hartmann's “Theory of Sublimation” suggests
the enormous implications of sublimation for the psychoanalysis of art, science and culture.
These emphases derive from Hartmann's Ego Psychology. However, it should be noted that his ego psychology does not bypass the genetic strategy. This approach, Hartmann notes, remains “fundamental” in psychoanalysis. Ego functions, he states, “can under circumstances become secondarily involved in conflicts of various kinds, and ego activities are genetically determined by the Id.”
Yet, Hartmann's unique contribution lies in his position that ego activities “normally acquire a certain autonomy from these genetic factors” and retain a “partial independence” in their structural, dynamic and economic features. Underlying this view is the assumption that part of the ego-energy belongs to the ego from the very beginning. This differentiation between genesis and function is one of the distinctions between man and the lower animals.
This approach has decisive import for the application of psychoanalysis to art and the humanities. In sublimation, Hartmann sees more than “reaction formation” at work. Sublimation, as Freud pointed out in The Ego and the Id, is