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This book is the report of a two-day meeting sponsored by the Psychoanalytic Research and Development Fund of New York. It consists of two parts, a series of presented papers and a stenographic report of the ensuing discussion, the latter undoubtedly edited for publication. The principal paper, by editor Martin Bergmann, is “The Hartmann Era and Its Contribution to Psychoanalytic Technique.” This contribution takes as its central thesis that there “was a time in the United States when [Heinz] Hartmann was regarded as the undisputed leader of American psychoanalysis” (p. 1). Associated with him and more or less united in their theoretical outlook, according to Bergmann, were a number of coworkers, “including Ernst Kris, Rudolf Loewenstein, Edith Jacobson, Margaret Mahler, Annie Reich, Kurt Eissler, Max Schur, and David Rapaport, to name only those who were most influential” (p. 6). It seems to me that this is too parochial a view, one focused exclusively on New York and, even there, solely on a single group. There is no doubt that Hartmann was highly respected and much admired in the New York Psychoanalytic Institute; to call him the undisputed leader of American psychoanalysis, however, seems both to overvalue his position and to neglect an important aspect of our field even then, namely, the diversity of theoretical and technical viewpoints contained within it.
Despite the book's overestimation of Hartmann's importance, much of it is devoted to criticism of his aims and theories. Often the contributors who criticize him do so more harshly than seems necessary and not always quite fairly. One would not learn from this volume, in which Hartmann is most often portrayed as a theorist uninterested in clinical matters, that he was responsible for establishing the Treatment Center of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute and served for two years as its director. If one of his associates, David Beres, is to be believed, Hartmann was in fact a shrewd clinician. Nor do his cr