Lawrence Hartmann


Lawrence Hartmann is an American child and adult psychiatrist, social-psychiatric activist, clinician, professor, 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 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, 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's.

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. 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, 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

Hartmann's activism and interest in complex psychiatic issues and biopsychosocial integration led him to be elected a member of the APA Assembly and subsequently Speaker of the Assembly before being elected Area Trustee, Vice President and then President of the APA.

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.

Selected bibliography

  • Hartmann, L. & Hanson, G., Child psychotherapy. In: Current Psychiatric Therapies, ed. J. Masserman. New York: Grune and Stratton, pp. 29–43.
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Additional references

  • American Psychoanalytic Association. Press Release: APsaA Issues Overdue Apology to LGBTQ Community. June 21, 2019. https://apsa.org/content/news-apsaa-issues-overdue-apology-lgbtq-community American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Lawrence Hartmann, M.D., Life Member's Report, June, 2012. https://www.aacap.org/aacap/Life_Members/Reports/2012/Hartmann_201206.aspx
  • Bayer, R. Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis. New York: Basic Books; New York, NY, USA: 1981.
  • Drescher, J. and J. P. Merlino, ed. American psychiatry and Homosexuality: An Oral History. Chapter 3: An Interview with Lawrence Hartmann, MD. Routledge: 2007.
  • Drescher J., Merlino J.P., editors. American Psychiatry and Homosexuality: An Oral History. Routledge; New York, NY, USA: 2007.
  • Levin, Aaron. Global Initiative on Psychiatry. Psychiatric News, Vol. 48, Issue 3, p 12. https://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/pdf/10.1176/pn.2013.48.issue-3
  • Spiegel, Alix. 81 Words: The Story of how the American Psychiatric Association decided in 1973 that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness. This American Life, 204: January 18, 2002. https://www.thisamericanlife.org/204/81-words
  • 5) Nightingale, Elena et al : "Apartheid Medicine", JAMA 264 : 2097-2102
  • 6) Hartmann, L. "Some Social Psychiatric Problems" in Psychiatry and World Accords, ed J. Masserman, New York, Gardner, 5-15