Paul Ornstein

Paul Hermann Ornstein (; April 4, 1924, Hajdúnánás, Hungary – January 19, 2017, Brookline, MA, US) was a Hungarian-American psychoanalyst and Holocaust survivor.

Early life Ornstein was born in Hungary in a Jewish family to parents, Abraham Ornstein, an accountant, and Frieda Sziment. At 15, Ornstein left home to attend Franz Josef National Rabbinical Seminary in Debrecen, Hungary. On a visit home from seminary, he met his future wife Anna Brunn.

Interest in psychoanalysis While he did attend a rabbinical seminary, he did not want to become a rabbi; rather, he wanted to study literature, archaeology, and philosophy. His interest in psychology evolved from reading novels, handwriting analysis, and poetry. At the seminary, he joined a study group that read Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud as well as Thalassa by Sándor Ferenczi and Ritual by Theodor Reik. Reik's book fostered Ornstein's interest in psychoanalysis especially because of his ability to connect it to his daily life as an observant Jew. Thus, at 15, he decided that he wanted to be a psychoanalyst. He was successful on his third attempt to escape from his battalion and reached Budapest, which was still occupied by Nazis at the time. During the siege of Budapest, he spent several months during 1944 hiding in the basement of the annex of the Swiss Embassy in Budapest. After the Soviet army took over Hungary, he returned to his hometown in search of his family and Anna. However, Russian soldiers arrested him and forced him to work in a Soviet labor battalion until he escaped. Other people were living in his childhood home and no one had heard of his family or Anna. Initially, he found no surviving relatives. The two married in 1946. However, only five states would allow them to take medical board exams which would certify them as American doctors, merely because of their immigrant status. Eventually, the two moved to Ohio, and he scored the highest in the state on the exam.

Career Both Paul and Anna Ornstein were pioneers in the self psychology movement, which challenged traditional Freudian analysis Heinz Kohut trained both Paul and Anna, and Paul was one of three of Kohut's disciples who Kohut expected to carry his legacy.

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

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

Ornstein's widow died on July 2, 2025, at age 98.