Lawrence Hartmann


Lawrence Hartmann is a child psychiatrist, social activist, and former President of the American Psychiatric Association. Hartmann played a central role in the APA's 1973 decision to remove homosexuality as a diagnosis of mental illness from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. This change opened the modern era of LGBTQ rights by providing support for the overturning of laws against homosexuals and by advancing gay civil rights, including the right to marry.

Early life

Hartmann was born in Vienna, Austria in 1937 into a family of intellectual social reformers. Hartmann's early years were unsettled by the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, and his family's consequent emigration from Vienna to Paris in 1938, to Switzerland in 1939, and to New York City in 1941. His father was Heinz Hartmann, an internationally known psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, as well as a student and analysand of Sigmund Freud. He became widely known as an ego-psychologist and a dean of world psychoanalysis in the mid-twentieth century. His mother, Dora Karplus Hartmann, M.D., came from a family of lawyers and publishers. A noted mountaineer in her early life, she chose to become a pediatrician in Vienna over the objections of her father who believed that a woman's constitution was not strong enough to endure medical school. She continued her medical training in New York to become a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst.

Education

Hartmann was educated at the Fieldston School in New York City after which he attended Harvard College, where he received a B.A. in History and Literature. As a Rhodes Scholar, Hartmann earned two degrees in English Literature from Oxford University. He received an M.D. from Harvard Medical School and then served as an intern in pediatrics at the University of California in San Francisco. He served his residency in psychiatry and a fellowship in child psychiatry at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. Upon completion of his training, Hartmann began a private practice and continued as a clinical professor of psychiatry at MMHC.

Career

Following the Kent State Shootings in 1970, Hartmann co-founded and chaired the Committee of Concerned Psychiatrists within the American Psychiatric Association with the goal of persuading the APA to “acknowledge and take part in social issues that affect mental health and mental illness.” The CoCP quickly expanded its involvement in social issues to include the Vietnam War and Civil Rights, as well as the newly emerging Women's Rights and Gay Rights Movements.
Finding the governing structure of the APA deeply conservative and self-perpetuating, Hartmann encouraged reform-minded candidates to run for leadership positions. Two such candidates encouraged by Hartmann and the CoCP were Alfred Friedman who served as APA president in 1973–1974 and John Spiegel who served as APA president in 1974–1975. Both of these men shared the CoCP's belief that public laws against homosexuality and prohibitions against homosexuals in psychiatry were based upon flawed studies, societal prejudice, and outdated psychoanalytic theory. Hartmann and the CoCP also participated in the APA's selection of Melvin Sabshin, a psychiatrist and social reformer open to broader membership participation in the APA, who served as the organization's medical director from 1974 until 1997.
Through his membership on the Social Issues Committee of the Northern New England Psychiatric Society, Hartmann and Richard PIllard who had just become one of the country's first psychiatrists to identify himself publicly as gay, drafted a position paper for the NNPS arguing that the homosexuality did not meet the scientific or clinical criteria for a diagnosis of mental illness, and that homosexuals deserved full civil rights. With minor modification, this paper was adopted by the NNPS and forwarded to the Assembly of the APA which passed a resolution drawn largely from the paper. In December 1973, the Board of Trustees of the APA voted 13-0, concurring that homosexuality was not valid as a diagnosis of mental illness. A small group of opponents attempted to reverse the Board's vote by referendum, but that effort failed, and the APA's membership affirmed the removal of homosexuality as a diagnosis of mental illness.
Hartmann's activism led him to be elected a member of the APA Assembly and subsequently Speaker of the Assembly before being elected Vice President and President of the APA.
As a member of the APA's Board of Trustees and International Affairs Committee, Hartmann led and participated in human rights missions to examine mental health conditions under apartheid in the Union of South Africa and under dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Working closely with Melvin Sabshin, Hartmann traveled to the Soviet Union to meet with dissident psychiatrists and to examine evidence of the abuse of psychiatry by the Soviet government. Hartmann's findings contributed to the successful efforts of Melvin Sabshin and the APA to persuade the World Psychiatric Association World Psychiatric Association to establish an Ethics Committee to investigate abuses of psychiatry. The Soviet Union resigned from the WPA in protest. In 1992, Hartmann led a Travelling University of Psychiatry to post-Iron-Curtain Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary under APA sponsorship.
In 1996, Hartmann co-founded the Committee on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity of the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute with Gerald Adler, M.D. psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. This work was part of a broader effort that resulted in the American Psychoanalytic Association issuing a public apology to the LGBTQ community on June 21, 2019 for its past views pathologizing homosexuality and transgender identities. In 2019, BPSI awarded Honorary Membership, to Hartmann citing his role in the APA's 1973 vote and his contribution to psychoanalysis by helping “to remove homophobia from our institutional culture by organizing conferences, leading evening programs, serving as a discussant during clinical presentations, and providing mentorship for gay analytic Candidates when none existed.”

Personal life

Hartmann has lived with Brian Pfeiffer, an architectural historian, in Cambridge, Massachusetts since 1973. They married in 2004 when Massachusetts became the first state in the nation to grant full civil rights for same-sex marriage.
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Drescher, J. An Interview with Lawrence Hartmann, M.D. p. 129.
Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. https://bpsi.org/page-2/

Selected bibliography