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Anna Ornstein (née Brünn; January 27, 1927 – July 2, 2025) was a Hungarian-American Auschwitz survivor, Psychoanalysis and psychiatrist, author, speaker, and scholar.
Anna's two brothers were sent to Arbeitslager, while she and the rest of her family were sent to Auschwitz. Her two brothers died at the camps, and the Germans killed her father and extended family when they arrived at Auschwitz in June 1944. However, Anna and her mother survived deportation, Auschwitz, ghetto imprisonment, and the Parschnitz labor camp. The two returned to Hungary in July 1945.
She was a Training and Supervising Analyst at the Cincinnati Psychoanalytic Institute and a Supervising Analyst at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute and Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis. She and her husband also co-founded and were co-directors of the International Center for the Study of Psychoanalytic Self-Psychology.
At the University of Cincinnati, Anna and Paul were instrumental in developing and leading the self psychology movement, "a post-Freudian method developed by Heinz Kohut, which stresses empathy and a relational approach in order to enhance the bond between patient and therapist and provide an analytic cure." They worked very closely with Heinz Kohut.
Ornstein wrote over 100 publications that cover a wide range of topics, including the interpretive process in psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, child psychotherapy, treatment of children and families, and post-traumatic recovery.
Ornstein was interviewed by The Washington Post, featured in The Jewish Journal, interviewed on Boston's National Public Radio station WGBH-TV, and featured in numerous other publications. She also served as a staff member of Facing History and Ourselves and the Terezin Music Foundation.
In 2004, Ornstein published her memoir, My Mother's Eyes: Holocaust Memories of a Young Girl, a collection of short stories of her life during the war.
Paul Ornstein died on January 19, 2017, at age 92.
Ornstein died in Brookline, Massachusetts on July 2, 2025, at age 98.
In their address honoring Ornstein with the Kravitz Award in 2018, Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute wrote:
"As a leader of American psychoanalysis, Dr. Ornstein has woven together the roles of scholar, clinician, teacher, and voice of conscience. There is perhaps no one who more fully fits the description of humanitarian psychoanalyst and activist than Dr. Ornstein.She later demonstrated this after a series of anti-Semitic events in the Reading schools this fall. Dr. Ornstein felt it was urgent to respond, both to the specific events and to the general political situation in our country. In particular, she felt it was critical to draw attention to the dangers of gradually accepting previously unthinkable repression and of normalizing outrageous intolerance. She met with Reading town officials and teachers and helped organize a group called Reading Embraces Diversity. She also talked to several hundred sixth, seventh, and eighth graders in Reading schools, presenting a piece on Kristallnacht that looked at similarities and differences between the situation in Europe in the 1930s and the current situation in the United States. After her presentation, the students asked questions about what had happened in Europe and whether it could happen here."
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