Lawrence Hartmann is a child and adult psychiatrist, social-psychiatric activist, and former President of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). 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 decisively changed the modern era of LGBTQ rights by providing support for the overturning of laws and prejudices against homosexuals and by advancing gay civil rights, including the right to immigrate, to adopt, to buy a home, to teach, to marry, and to be left alone.
Family and early life
Hartmann grew up in New York City. He was born in Vienna, Austria in 1937 into a prominent family of intellectuals, professors, and social reformers. Hartmann's early years were unsettled by the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany (Anschluss), 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 (1894–1970), an internationally known psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, as well as a student and analysand of Sigmund Freud's. HH became widely known as an ego-psychologist and something of a dean of world psychoanalysis in the mid-twentieth century. LH's mother, Dora (Karplus) Hartmann,. (1902–1974), 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 usually supportive lawyer 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 and academic and clinical career
Hartmann was educated at the Fieldston School in New York City and then at Harvard College, where he received a B.A. in History and Literature (magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa). 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 (1965–1967) and a fellowship in child psychiatry (1967–1969) at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center (MMHC), a Harvard Teaching Hospital. He was psychoanalyzed from 1966 until 1971. Upon completion of his training, Hartmann began a private practice with adults, adolescents, and children ; ran a child and adolescent psychiatry clinic and a school consultation program; and, for about 50 years, taught, and served as a clinical professor of psychiatry, at Harvard Medical School, mostly at MMHC and later mostly at Cambridge Hospital. He has written on such topics as child psychotherapy, dirty words, ethics, play, apartheid, torture, skepticism, and biopsychosocial integration.
Public career
Following the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State Shootings in 1970, Hartmann co-founded and co-chaired the Committee For Concerned Psychiatrists within the American Psychiatric Association with goals including persuading the APA to “acknowledge and take part in social issues that affect mental health and mental illness.” The CFCP expanded its central focus on APA structure and leadership somewhat also into social issues, including not just the Vietnam War but also Civil Rights, Women's Rights, Children's Rights, and Minority Rights, including Gay and Lesbian Rights.
Finding the governing structure of the APA deeply conservative and self-perpetuating, Hartmann re-wrote some APA By-Laws, which changes the APA membership repeatedly passed, and, with several CFCP friends and colleagues, and much support from APA members, found and encouraged and nominated distinguished reform-minded candidates to run for leadership positions. Candidates nominated and boosted by the CFCP included Alfred Friedman (1917–2011) who served as APA president in 1973–1974 and John Spiegel (1911–1991) who served as APA president in 1974–1975; as well as Judd Marmor, Jack Weinberg, Viola Bernard, Mildred Nitchell-Bateman, and Alan Stone. These leaders mostly shared or came to share the CFCP'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 CFCP also participated in the APA's selection of Melvin Sabshin (1925–2011), a distinguished psychiatrist, dean, and social reformer who favored broader membership participation in the APA, and who went on to serve as the organization's Medical Director from 1974 until 1997.
