Dr. Heinz Hartmann was born in Vienna, the son of a historian and future Austrian Ambassador to Germany. He was graduated from the University of Vienna School of Medicine in 1920, and worked until 1934 in the Department of Psychiatry there. He became deeply interested in psychoanalysis, and soon established himself as a theoretician of the first rank, working closely with Freud. He left Vienna after the Nazi invasion, stayed in Paris and Switzerland, and came to New York in 1941.
In 1939, the year of Freud's death, Dr. Hartmann published a monograph, “Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation,” which is generally regarded as the foundation of modern ego psychology and a major step in establishing psychoanalysis as a comprehensive theory of personality.
Dr. Hartmann quickly became a leading figure in the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and continued as an active member of its Faculty almost until the end of his life. He was the first Director of the Institute's Treatment Center, and served as President of the Society. He was President and later Honorary President of the International Psychoanalytic Association, and was co-founder and Editor of the “Psychoanalytic Study of the Child.” He published a great number of important papers both alone and in a unique collaboration with Ernst Kris and Rudolph Loewenstein which lasted 15 years, and which made the trio, Hartmann, Kris, and Loewenstein, a household term in psychoanalysis. For his 70th birthday he was honored by a Festschrift volume entitled “Psychoanalysis: A General Psychology.”
Eulogists at his funeral on May 19 spoke not only of his eminence as a theoretician in psychoanalysis, but of his warm humanity and the depth and variety of his interests: his love of music, poetry, and philosophy and of nature, as well as more active pursuits, in earlier years, such as skiing and mountain climbing.
He is survived by his widow, Dr. Dora Karplus Hartmann, who is also a psychoanalyst and a member of the Faculty at the New York Institute; two sons, Ernest and Lawrence, both of whom are psychiatrists in Boston; a sister, Dr. Else Paneth, who is a physician in London, and two grandchildren.