Heinz Hartmann

[2] In 1937, at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, he presented a study on the psychology of ego, a topic on which he would later expand on and which became the foundation for the theoretical movement known as ego-psychology.

In 1945 he founded an annual publication The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child with Ernst Kris and Anna Freud; while in the 1950s he became the president of the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) and after several years of his presidency, he received the honorary title of lifetime president.Hartmann's mortal remains were buried at the cemetery of the 15th-century chapel of Fex-Crasta in the Val Fex, which is a part of the municipality of Sils im Engadin/Segl, a village in the Swiss canton of Graubünden.

His wife Dorothea "Dora", née Karplus (1902-1974), who was a US-American, Austrian-born psychoanalyst as well, found her final resting place at his side.

In 1939, Hartmann, in what Otto Fenichel called "a very interesting paper, tried to show that adaptation has been studied too much from the point of view of mental conflict.

[7] Ego-psychology became in fact the dominant psychoanalytic force in the States for the next half-century or so, before object relations theory began to come to the fore.

[9] Jacques Lacan focused much of his ire on what he called "'ego psychology' à la Hartmann...as a repudiation of psychoanalysis"[10] – taking issue with its stress on the conflict-free zone of the ego and on adaptation to reality.