You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
It is a measure of Heinz Hartmann's thinking that attempting to assess his contribution two decades after his death quickly leads to thoughts about the general state of psychoanalysis today. One cannot speak of Hartmann's contribution just to theory, or just to clinical practice, or just to the relationships between psychoanalysis and adjacent discipliness. He addressed all of these issues in condensed, interrelated ways — in many cases setting the terms for the debates that still occupy us as analytic thinkers and practitioners. Contemporary analysts operate far beyond the borders within which Freud created his new discipline. We see more and different sorts of patients, we have evolved new and more ambitious treatment goals, and we apply psychoanalytic principles in an expanding range of research settings. Probably none of this would have happened, or would have happened in quite the same way, without Hartmann's work.
Since Breuer first met Anna O. it has been fashionable to say that psychoanalysis is going through a particularly exciting and/or trying phase of its development. Usually, perhaps always, this has been true. But there is reason to think it even more true today. Until recently, adherents of a large number of competing theoretical models worked in isolation from each other. The possibility of psychoanalytic