17 Facts About Paul Ornstein

Paul Hermann Ornstein was a Hungarian-American psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor.

At 15, Paul Ornstein left home to attend Franz Josef National Rabbinical Seminary in Debrecen, Hungary.

In March 1944, Germans invaded Hungary, and Paul Ornstein was forced by the German Army to dig trenches as part of a forced labor battalion in World War II on the eastern front of Poland and Ukraine.

Paul Ornstein was successful on his third attempt to escape from his battalion and reached Budapest, which was still occupied by Nazis at the time.

Months after the war had ended, Paul Ornstein was still in medical school in Romania when he discovered that his mother and three younger brothers were murdered in Auschwitz.

Paul Ornstein hid in a freight train and returned to Budapest.

Paul Ornstein's began his second year of medical school at the University of Budapest as the Communists seized power, before escaping with Anna to Western Europe.

Paul Ornstein attended one year of medical school at the University of Munich and then he and Anna enrolled at the Heidelberg University School of Medicine, where many former Nazi soldiers were their classmates and some still wore parts of their uniforms.

The United States had almost no residency training programs that would accept immigrants, so Paul Ornstein and Anna found work in hospitals in Delaware, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts until 1955 when the University of Cincinnati Medical School's chair of psychiatry - who was a psychoanalyst - recruited them.

Paul Ornstein worked as a Professor of Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis at the University of Cincinnati Medical School, Lecturer at Harvard Medical School, and Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.

Paul Ornstein was a prolific writer, clinician, lecturer, teacher, and mentor.

Paul Ornstein served on many editorial boards and published over 100 scholarly, clinical, and theoretical articles in numerous languages - many of which he wrote with his wife Anna.

Paul Ornstein wrote Focal Psychotherapy: An Example of Applied Psychoanalysis with Michael Balint and Enid Balint and edited four volumes of The Search for the Self: Selected Writings of Heinz Kohut.

In May 2019, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis published a multi-page obituary for Paul Ornstein detailing his incredible life and immense impact on psychoanalysis.

Paul Ornstein deepened our knowledge of patients who suffer from narcissistic personality and behaviour disorders and expanded psychoanalytic techniques.

Paul Ornstein developed [Heinz] Kohut's original contributions, especially the functions of empathy and the conceptualization of narcissistic transferences, later referred to as selfobject transferences within a self-selfobject matrix.

Paul Ornstein described a basic direction, still often neglected, for analytic treatment; a patient first needs to feel accepted and understood before it is meaningful to understand, and it is only then that a patient and an analyst can work on a structure for the interpretive process.