Heinz Hartmann—1894–1970

Heinz Hartmann's sudden death of a coronary thrombosis, on 17 May, created an immense feeling of loss in his family, his many friends, colleagues and students, and admirers all over the world. This loss is due not alone to the cessation of an outstanding scientific career, but to the disappearance of an extraordinary personality. His scientific work has been and will continue to be studied by psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, psychologists and other scientists, and it will continue to have an enormous influence on their thinking and work. But this is not the time or the place to speak of Hartmann the scientist. Tonight we are honouring the memory of a colleague, teacher and friend.

Heinz Hartmann was born in Vienna in 1894. His father was a renowned historian and a leader in adult education for the working class, who served for a time as Austrian Ambassador to Germany after World War I. Heinz's mother, artistically gifted, was a sculptress and an accomplished pianist.

Having obtained his medical degree in 1920 at the University of Vienna, Hartmann soon decided to specialize in psychiatry. Except for one year at the Berlin Institute, where he continued the analytic training he had begun in Vienna, he worked at the Psychiatric and Neurologic Institute of Vienna University from 1920 until 1934. Following that period he was teacher and training analyst first at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute, then at the Paris Psychoanalytic Institute and, from 1941 on, at the New York Institute. He was editor of the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse from 1932 until 1941. Since its inception in 1945, he was one of the managing editors of The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child, which he founded with Anna Freud and Ernst Kris. He served as Medical Director of the Treatment Center of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute from 1948 to 1951, as President of the New York Psychoanalytic Society from 1952 to 1954, as President of the International Psycho-Analytical Associat