Heinz Hartmann was born and educated in Vienna. As a student of S. Freud, Hartmann amplified and elaborated numerous aspects of psychoanalytic theory, including the relation of intrapsychic events and of psychoanalysis to the environment, to society, and to the social sciences. He became a leading theoretician of psychoanalysis and a pioneer in the field of psychoanalytic ego psychology. Hartmann emphasized the activities of that psychic construct, the ego, as no less important than of the drives, the id (the inherited instinctive impulses of the individual as part of the unconscious). He pointed out the importance of man’s adapting to an ‘average expectable environment’ as a function of the ego. Both, Heinz Hartmann and his wife Dora, belonged to one of those groups comprising teachers and students, who had very close professional as well as social relationship.
In 1938 the Hartmanns emigrated to Switzerland and in 1941 they settled in the USA. Heinz Hartmann served as president of the International and New York Psychoanalytic Association (1951-1957 and 1952-1954 respectively). In 1959 he was made honorary president of the International Association.
Hartmann’s paper the Ich-Psychologie und Anpassungsproblem, published in 1939, was translated into English in 1958 as Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation.