Looking Back: Memoir of a Psychoanalyst by a BPSI member, Paul Ornstein, with Helen Epstein, and an afterword by Charles Fenyvesi has just been released by Plunkett Lake Press. The book is available in paperback for $15.95 (click here to order). You can also purchase it in the electronic format for your Kindle, Nook, Apple iBooks, or Kobo for $9.99 (if you don’t have an eBook device, you can still read it on your tablet or any computer – ask BPSI librarian for assistance).
NEW: Watch a recent interview of Paul Ornstein by Daniel Jacobs!
Looking Back is the unusual memoir of a senior figure in the international psychoanalytic community. Dr. Paul Ornstein was one of the small and distinguished group of Holocaust survivors/physicians who came to the U.S. after the second world war and became prominent in American psychoanalysis. His memoir traces his route from a small town in Hungary, to Budapest’s Neolog Rabbinical Seminary, to a Hungarian forced labor battalion, through medical school in post-war Heidelberg to the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, to Cincinnati, Ohio, where he became a prominent professor of psychiatry and a leader of the psychoanalytic Self Psychology movement.
“In this memoir, Paul Ornstein describes his remarkable and moving personal, historical and professional life journey, losing many family members, his community, and his country in the Shoah, yet being blessed from the beginning with a resilient optimism and clear-eyed certainty about what he can accomplish and who and what matters to him: family first and foremost, friends, community and identity, and being a psychoanalyst. Looking Back, including photos and accounts of Ornstein’s close relationship with his long-lived survivor father, with Michael Balint, and with Hans Kohut, could be called ‘My Father’s Culture’. It serves as companion volume to his beloved Anna’s My Mother’s Eyes.” — Dr. Nancy J. Chodorow, Author, The Power of Feelings, Individualizing Gender and Sexuality and other works; Professor of Sociology Emerita, University of California, Berkeley; Lecturer on Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School; Training and Supervising Analyst, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute.
About the Author
Paul Ornstein was born in Hajdúnánás, Hungary in 1924 and educated at the Franz Josef Rabbinical Seminary in Budapest, where he discovered psychoanalysis. After surviving the Shoah in Hungary, he received his degree in medicine from the University of Heidelberg, then emigrated to the United States and became a leading figure in psychoanalytic self-psychology. Dr. Ornstein is a graduate of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, an Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis at the University of Cincinnati Medical School, and a Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. He co-authored Focal Psychotherapy: An Example of Applied Psychoanalysis with Michael and Enid Balint and edited The Search for the Self: selected writings of Heinz Kohut.
