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Heinz Hartmann was the guiding genius of modern Freudian theory. He attempted to develop to its highest possible point Freud's natural-science model of mind. With rare consistency he formulated his metapsychological contributions from the specific vantage point of biological adaption. Thus he emphasized evolutionary, organismic, ecological and functional modes of conceptualization. The adaptational vantage point was deliberately chosen by Hartmann; it is not the only possible vantage point for psychoanalytic theorizing. Indeed the natural-science model itself is a theoretical option: rather than its flowing from 'the data', it is an a priori that determines the definition, selection and arrangement of data. Other a priori models, such as the historical and existential, though their adequacy for dealing with the full range of phenomena defined in Freud's psychoanalysis has not yet been established, are available as options for the psychoanalytic investigator and remain to be worked out and evaluated comparatively.
I have discussed the following aspects of Hartmann's contributions: (a) their assault on dualistic constraints in Freud's thinking; (b) their establishing or making clear the legitimacy of different modes of psychoanalytic conceptualizing; (c) their laying bare the anatomy of the natural-scientific Freudian metapsychology as a necessary step towards elegant systematization and detailing of that theory; (d) their synchronization, refinement and amplification of Freud's psychoeconomic propositions, especially through the use of the concepts of neutral and neutralized energy; and (e) their seeming implicitly to follow or parallel a socio-political model of mind as (meaningful and purposive) government.