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Health|Anna Ornstein, Psychoanalyst Who Survived the Holocaust, Dies at 98
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/04/health/anna-ornstein-dead.html
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Despite the unspeakable horror of her youth, she embraced a school of psychotherapy that stresses empathy and the belief that everyone can change for the better.
July 4, 2025, 2:46 p.m. ET
That Anna Ornstein, a Holocaust survivor, focused on trauma in a long career as a psychoanalyst may not come as a surprise.
That Dr. Ornstein, who was deported to Auschwitz when she was 17, sought to heal children and adolescents may also not be surprising.
But a startling aspect of Dr. Ornstein’s life and chosen profession was that, despite having experienced unspeakable horror in her youth, she embraced a school of psychotherapy that stresses empathy, seeing the world through others’ eyes, and a belief that all people, even those who seem the most vile, contain a spark of humanity.
Dr. Ornstein, who was born in Hungary and in the 1950s emigrated to the United States, where she practiced and taught child psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati and Harvard and became a leading exponent of a school known as self-psychology, died on Wednesday at her home in Brookline, Mass. She was 98.
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Her daughter Sharone Ornstein, who is also a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst, confirmed the death.
“She had a way of bringing her personal lived experience seamlessly into her work,” the younger Dr. Ornstein said in an interview. “She had a determination to live and create a life, and not be defined by her trauma.”
