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The 1940s through the 1960s in American psychoanalysis has been dubbed the Hartmann era. Now Hartmann’s name is barely whispered in the institutes. This despite the pervasive, although perhaps invisible, influence of his works. All eras labor under the illusion of having at last found the right way to think about things. Contemplating Hartmann’s fall as a theory builder might stimulate us to question our own seemingly unquestionable assumptions. What will last and what will fade of our own cherished theories? The short rise of anxiety at this question, a reaction to a danger signal in the older ego psychological parlance, might also lead us to reconsider what was valuable in Hartmann’s thinking, once we discard the mechanistic cliches of his “Rube Goldberg contraptions” of ego functions and defenses (see Bornstein, this issue, for an elaboration of this metaphor). We might then wonder, what went wrong for Hartmann’s legacy? Have we lost our taste for abstract language? Was Hartmann undone by his positivist ambition of creating a general psychology, which led to ingenious empirical studies of intersubjectivity but fell flat in clinical work which was becoming increasingly oriented toward the particular? Was he too closely associated with the autocratic politics of American psychoanalysis, such that we have had to dissociate his theories out of shame and fear? Or was adaptation as a concept simply unable to survive the iconoclastic ethos of the 1960s, where “fitting in” found itself facing off, rather unfairly, against the more romantic notion of rebelling or “dropping out.” Or had Hartmann simply effaced himself behind a theory that many others have adopted to their own use, such that the original fell away like a husk? I agree with Levenson (1988) when he said that all good psychoanalysts from all schools have in common that they ask good questions. The papers in this issue all ask good questions, even when they provide answers.
Daniel Goldin, MFT, Psy.D.
Issue Editor