The Hartmann Era

June 1, 2002. I appreciate very much that Charles Brenner, at this stage in his life, took time out to review the proceedings of the symposium on the Hartmann era that I chaired ( J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn.  50/1↗). Because important issues for the history of psychoanalysis are at stake, I wish to reply to his review. It happens we are both celebrating our ninetieth birthday this year, and since psychoanalysts, like Socrates, are both human and mortal, there are only a few of us who lived through this era and so can debate it in terms of personal experience. Four points were the subject of this symposium, which some of our most distinguished colleagues—Jacob A. Arlow, Harold Blum, André Green, William I. Grossman, Otto Kernberg, Anton Kris, Peter Neubauer, Albert Solnit, and Clifford Yorke—found important enough to participate in: (1) Heinz Hartmann, together with a small group of coworkers (René Spitz, Edith Jacobson, Margaret Mahler, Anna Freud, Ernst Kris, and Kurt Eissler), all of them refugees from Europe, so transformed American psychoanalysis as to justify the term “the Hartmann era.” (2) With the exception of the Hampstead Clinic, Anna Freud's center in London, the ideas of the Hartmann group did not find a foothold in other countries. (3) The Hartmann era, with its concepts and vocabulary, has faded from the American scene. (4) If the analysis of these events is correct, psychoanalytic history is more significantly influenced by cultural changes then we have hitherto been ready to face. There is a dire need for a history of psychoanalysis as a history of ideas, and this book was a step in that direction.

Brenner disagrees, considering my view “too parochial” and “focused exclusively on New York.” We both will have to await the verdict of history. As if in support of my position, the very same issue of JAPA contains a paper by Robert Wallerstein, “The Growth and Transformation of American Ego Psychology,” which in all essentials agrees with my point of view. I'v