Prologue: Heinz Hartmann Revisited: The Ongoing Problem of Adaptation

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).

A brief biography

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. In medical school, he became interested in Freudian theories and went into analysis first with Rado and then with Freud himself, when the latter offered him free analysis as an enticement for him to stay in Vienna. Hartmann’s brilliance and close relationship with Freud led him to become an important participant in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. After Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, Hartmann moved to New York, where, “by virtue of his prestigious family, the unusual education he received, his commanding presence, and the fact that he was more or less personally anointed by Freud, came to be the unchallenged, designated spokesman for psychoanalysis” (Arlow, 2000, p. 87). His preeminence coincided – whether causally or coincidentally – with a time when the American psychoanalytic institutes became increasingly intolerant and hyper-vigilant toward heresy. Authors developing challenging ideas were often tagged “resistant” and therefore deemed riddled with unanalyzed pathology. In post 60s America, with the advent of self-psychology, object-relations theories, neo Kleinian and Bionian theories, interpersonal and relational theories, among others, Hartmann’s influence faded and his great dense book fell out of print.

Hartmann’s contributions

The following is a summary of Hartmann’s major contributions (again, as I understand them).

The centrality of adaptation

Without quite saying as much, Hartmann gave to the ego a supervening drive of its own, the drive to adapt, operating above desire and aggression. As Mayes puts it, “the capacities serving the ego operated outside of a conflict based on instinctual life.” The instincts yes, the world yes, but a movement toward adaptation above all. The concept of psychic determinism faded into the background. There is something within us that pushes forward and makes things happen. Strip away the meta-psychological language and we are very close to Kohut’s conceptualization of the “self as a center of initiative,” influenced and influencing at once.

The world comes into view

Freud shifted away from seeing trauma in the environment as having a primary effect on the mind. Instead he turned to a notion of psychic reality, “with the fixation points of the libido as the main cause of mental illness. Hartmann’s emphasis on adaptation redressed the balance in favor of the environment” (Bergman, 2000, p. 1). The world burst into the picture, not just in pathology, but as a defining aspect of normal development.

A new emphasis on trauma

In considering how our preadaptive capacities might be expected to unfold, Hartmann posited an “average expectable environment” in which our adaptive capacities first evolved. This is a similar notion to one posited by some evolutionary psychologists, namely that humans are preadapted to the environment of the Pleistocene age when they first evolved into homo sapiens. The difference is that Hartmann had in mind a preadaptation to the usual way of the family and of the culture, not the natural world. It was now possible to conceptualize great divergences from this usual way as deeply traumatic, such as when a parent is abusive or neglectful, stressing to the breaking-point a child’s inborn adaptive capacities.

A theory of human development in health

In his determination to make psychoanalysis a general theory rather than a theory of pathology, Hartmann was sensitive to the canonical ways humans develop in interaction with their environment. His notion of “change of function” (a defense turned into an ability) and “secondary autonomy” (the conflict-free state that ensues) focused attention on our ongoing reach into the future as distinct from the determinations of the past. This developmental thrust opened a path to the empirical study of humans in interaction, with an eye to describing good-enough development. Lou Sander’s introduction of complexity theory into this project brought a new dimension to Hartmann’s ideas of fittedness. The work of Daniel Stern, Edward Tronick (see this issue), Beatrice Beebee and the Boston Change Process Study Group among others, although perhaps not directly influenced by Hartmann, came out of a theoretical atmosphere that saw the human animal as emerging in reciprocal interactions with its environment.

The papers

The papers in this issue represent a multi-faceted exploration of Hartmann’s legacy, “what lasts and what fades,” to use Lichtenberg’s (2016) felicitous phrase.

Fred Busch opens our issue by proposing that psychoanalysis builds on the ancient proverb “know thyself.” Busch credits Hartmann with bringing psychoanalysis in closer alignment with the Delphic oracle by changing the goal of clinical work from reconstruction of the past to building more complex representations of the mind at work. Through several beautifully written case-studies, he explores how Hartmann’s concept of adaptation adds complexity and temporality to explanations and permits the analyst to understand the patient in a “more benign way” as having adapted as best they could under the circumstances, leading “to ‘of course’ interpretations, rather than ‘you are’ interpretations.”

Smith begins by noting that Hartmann’s legitimization of the external world allowed for the development of ideas usually associated with relational schools of thought. He provides the example of Winnicott, whose concept of the “facilitating environment” and the “good-enough mother” were relational extensions of Hartmann’s concept of the “average expectable environment.” But the heart of the paper is a process-oriented analysis of Hartmann’s use of language, his equivocations, his detours and delays, his almost perverse enjoyment in turning an idea into its opposite and then back again. Smith wonders if this stop-and-start linguistic tic represents an ambivalent tie to the Freuds as potentially critical readers. We are left with a question. Was Hartmann’s torturous qualifying of his ideas the first tendrils of both-and thinking so often celebrated in contemporary psychoanalysis, or does it betray the anxiety of a man trying to serve a master with whom he has come to disagree?

Harrison and Tronick begin by noting a similarity between Hartmann’s notion of adaptation as “a reciprocal relationship between the organism and its environment” and infant researcher Lou Sander’s description of adaptation as “the fitting together over time of infant and caregiver.” The authors’ diverge from Hartmann largely through their application of the theory of dynamic open systems to infant research. Self-organizing creatures seek to increase their complexity and coherence in order to grow. In this model, Hartmann’s reality is replaced by a “state of consciousness,” which reflects a sense of self-in-the-world. When “meanings are shared, a dyadic state of consciousness is co-created … [bringing together] information from both individuals such that it contains more information than each individual’s state of consciousness alone.” Harrison and Tronick offer an extended example of this conjoining of separate “realities” in a lovely, moving vignette involving Lego play between Harrison and small child, in which the two adapt to each other’s moves with the object of forming a more complex and coherent state of consciousness.

Marcus applies the Janus-faced adaptative point of view to dream analysis, where the allegory of the dream simultaneously reveals a neurosis and a potential adaptation to a real problem. He applies Arieti’s concept of tertiary process to describe the dream-work, in which primary process engages with secondary process to find new mature solutions to problems. For Marcus, “the dream work symbolizes. The waking work desymbolizes … applying the lessons of the dream in service of adaptation.” Marcus analyses several adaptive dreams: one which tackles the problems which arise during a new period of development, another which represents an adaptive take on strain trauma, and a third which reveals and attempts to solve the analyst’s counter-transference dilemma.

Shill amends Hartmann by bringing affect and object-relations into the foreground. He notes at the top of his paper the increased flexibility of Freud’s later structural theory, which emphasized compromise formations, over the topographic model, which emphasized repression. But for an adaptive process of compromise to take place, the individual must be able to tolerate floods of affect, pointing to the centrality of affect regulation in the project of adaptation. In the course of elaborating his emendation of the theory, Shill chooses to discard some of Hartmann’s more problematic, and in Shill’s mind no longer necessary, ideas: the concept of neutralized energy, the concept of the conflict-free zone of the ego, the concept that the id and the ego derived from an undifferentiated matrix, among other ideas that Shill sees as Hartmann’s attempt to pour new wine into old bottles. In reconsidering Freud’s psycho-sexual stages from a phenomenological perspective, Shill concludes that each stage represents a new challenge in affect tolerance in the service of an intersubjective relationship designed to maintain homeostatic balance.

Bornstein closes out our issue by describing his own personal psychoanalytic odyssey under the influence of Hartmann. Bornstein understands his traumatic childhood, dominated by a psychotic mother who lost interest in him, as leaving him in an environment in which normal adaptation was not possible. The best adaptation available to him at that time was to isolate and repress his emotional situation with his mother, leaving him “spooked with experiences from deep inside.” Through analysis, Bornstein learned to revise these experiences in order to own them. In this remarkable autobiographical essay, Bornstein reconceptualizes conflict as a struggle between the anti-adaptative pull of repetition, riveting a person to an unchanging past, and the forward-moving project of adaptation, which he describes in simple phenomenological terms as “a love of life.”

Daniel Goldin, MFT, Psy.D.

Issue Editor

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Notes on contributors

Daniel Goldin

Daniel Goldin, MFT, Psy.D., is a training and supervising psychoanalyst practicing in South Pasadena, California. He serves as the editor of Psychoanalytic Inquiry and associate editor of Psychoanalysis: Self and Context and is on the faculty of the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. He has written many articles for a variety of publications.