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About three years ago, Joe Lichtenberg (2021) sent me a draft of a chapter he was working on in which he described Hartmann’s theory of pre-adaptation. What Hartmann meant by “preadaptation” was that the human animal comes into this world with an inborn capacity to adapt to a changing environment, to shape mind and world to achieve fit. That idea appealed to me in its vast reach and in its simplicity.
The contemporary relational schools in which I came of age as an analyst tended to portray Hartmann as the mechanistic representative of an autocratic and conformist psychoanalytic past that we have thankfully put behind us. But the bright idea of preadaptation nagged, and eventually I headed to Amazon to buy Hartmann’s The Ego and the Problem of Adaptation. I was surprised to discover that the book was out of print. I was even more surprised to discover, upon reading a battered much-underlined hardcover edition bought from a private seller, that the book remained fresh and inspiring 80 years after its first publication in German, despite its meta-psychological language and sometimes tortured argumentation. I put together this issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry with the purpose or reconsidering Hartmann’s contributions from a contemporary perspective. Now that the Hartmann era has receded into the distant past, my hope is we will be better able to explore his magnificent contributions, without fearing to be sucked into a vortex of orthodoxy. Since Hartmann’s ideas are rarely taught these days, I have expanded this prologue beyond what is usual for Psychoanalytic Inquiry in order to provide a short description of Hartmann and his major contributions (as I understand them).
Hartmann was born in Vienna in 1894 and died in New York in 1970. His father was an eminent historian, who founded libraries and for a time served as an ambassador, with Heinz as his assistant. Through his father, Hartmann became acquainted with the great fin de siècle thinkers in Vienna.