Heinz Hartmann's Influence on Psychoanalysis as a Science

The work of heinz hartmann was motivated, in part at least, by his wish to contribute to achieving one primary objective. He thought psychoanalysis should be a general psychology, and his theoretical essays addressed the problem of making it one. In this paper, I do not attempt to explicate or assess what and how much that was valuable he added to psychoanalytic theory as he went about this task. Schafer (1970) has already described and evaluated these additions. I do want, however, to consider the consequences for the development of psychoanalysis as a science of pursuing this objective.

In short, I argue that adopting such an objective obscures just which domain of phenomena psychoanalysis is most likely to be able to explain. Furthermore, psychoanalysis may pursue this objective by imperialistically incorporating the knowledge of other disciplines — often merely translating their terminology into that of psychoanalysis — but the price of this “enrichment” is that psychoanalytic theory becomes increasingly unwieldy and difficult to test. The difficulty is evident if one believes, as Hartmann did, that the data used in carrying out such tests will, for the most part, be obtained