Paul Ornstein

Paul Hermann Ornstein was born in Hajdunanas, Hungary on April 4, 1924. He studied at the Franz Josef National Rabbinical Seminary before being forced into a labor gang by the Germans. During World War II, he was conscripted to dig trenches to protect Nazi and Hungarian troops from the advancing Russians in Ukraine. After managing to escape, he hid for months in 1944 in the basement of the Swiss Embassy annex in Budapest. Once the Red Army routed the Germans, he returned to his hometown in Hungary to search for his parents, his four siblings and his girlfriend Anna Brunn. He enrolled in medical school in Hungary to pursue a career in psychoanalysis. Six months later, he learned that his father and Anna were still alive. They enrolled in the Heidelberg University School of Medicine in Germany. They married in 1946 and moved to the United States, where they became major figures in the self-psychology movement. He did his residency in psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati and trained at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. He became a professor of psychiatry and psychoanalysis at the University of Cincinnati. His memoir, Looking Back: Memoir of a Psychoanalyst written with Helen Epstein was published in 2015. He died of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis on January 19, 2017 at the age of 92.