Paul Hermann Ornstein (April 4, 1924, in Hajdunanas, Hungary - d. Jan. 19, 2017, Brookline, Massachusetts) was an American psychoanalyst.
Ornstein was born in Hungary to a Jewish family, Abraham Ornstein, an accountant, and the former Frieda Sziment. As a young teenager he was forced by the German Army to dig trenches as part of a forced labor battalion in World War II. After the Red Army pushed west, he spent several months during 1944 hiding in the basement of the annex of the Swiss Embassy in Budapest. When the war ended, he returned to his home town in Hungary; he was just 17, and found no surviving relatives.[1][2]
Ornstein enrolled in Medical School in Hungary, then discovered that his father and a distant cousin, Anna Brunn, a few years younger than he, had also survived. The two cousins enrolled in medical school at the Heidelberg University School of Medicine, where there were many former Nazi soldiers among their classmates. They were married in 1946 and immigrated to the united States where they were both active in the self psychology movement, which challenged traditional Freudian analysis.[1]
He published a memoir, “Looking Back: Memoir of a Psychoanalyst” (2015, with Helen Epstein)[3][4]
References
- ^ a b Roberts, Sam (31 January 2017). "Paul Ornstein, 92, Psychoanalyst and Holocaust Survivor, Dies". New York Times. Retrieved 7 February 2017.
- ^ Cantrell, Cindy (16 February 2016). "From Budapest to Brookline, a psychoanalyst looks back". Boston Globe. Retrieved 7 February 2017.
- ^ Solomon, David (6 September 2016). "Looking Back: Memoir of a Psychoanalyst (book review)". Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Retrieved 7 February 2017.
- ^ Weisel-Barth, J (July 2016). "What Is a Life Well Lived? A Review of Looking Back: Memoir of a Psychoanalyst (book review)". International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology 11(3):293-299.