At 15, Ornstein left home to attend Franz Josef National Rabbinical Seminary in Debrecen, Hungary.
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.
[3] With few options, he decided to leave with a friend to Romania and enroll in the medical school at the University of Cluj.
Months after the war had ended, Ornstein was still in medical school in Romania when he discovered that his mother and three younger brothers were murdered in Auschwitz.
Paul's began his second year of medical school at the University of Budapest as the Communists seized power, before escaping with Anna to Western Europe.
[5] The United States had almost no residency training programs that would accept immigrants, so Paul and Anna found work in hospitals in Delaware, New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts until 1955 when the University of Cincinnati Medical School's chair of psychiatry - who was also a psychoanalyst - recruited them.
[7] Both Paul and Anna Ornstein were pioneers in the self psychology movement, which challenged traditional Freudian analysis[2] and pushed therapists to disregard any misconceptions and enter fully into their patients' lives.
Ornstein served on many editorial boards and published over 100 scholarly, clinical, and theoretical articles in numerous languages - many of which he wrote with his wife Anna.
[3] The piece's author, psychoanalyst Dr. Jeffrey K. Halpern, explains Ornstein's contributions to psychoanalysis and psychiatry:"Ornstein’s writings encompassed the uses of empathy, the interpretative process, omnipotence in health and illness, “Chronic Rage from Underground,” unconscious fantasy, dreams, the conceptualization of clinical facts and the patient's encounters with the analyst's theory...Ornstein deepened our knowledge of patients who suffer from narcissistic personality and behaviour disorders and expanded psychoanalytic techniques.