Orna Ophir

B.A. Psychology & Criminology, Bar Ilan University, 1994
M.A. Clinical Psychology, Bar Ilan University, 1997
Ph.D. History & Philosophy of Science, Tel Aviv University, 2009

Orna Ophir is a New York State-licensed psychoanalyst in private practice and a trained historian of science and ideas. She joined NYU in 2017 as a part-time faculty member at NYU Gallatin and as an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Comparative Literature in the College of Arts & Science. She is an Adjunct Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychology in Psychiatry at Weill-Cornell Medical College, where she has served as an Associate Director of the DeWitt Wallace Institute for Psychiatry: History, Policy and the Arts since 2021. Ophir holds a PhD from the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. In 2010, her dissertation was awarded the Mara Beller Annual Distinction by the Israeli Society for the History and Philosophy of Science. In 2011, she was selected to give the Frieda Fromm-Reichmann Memorial Lecture at The Washington Center for Psychoanalysis. In 2013, she was a runner-up for the Tyson Award at the International Psychoanalytic Association Congress in Prague and won the best paper award from North America at the IPSO conference. Ophir was trained as a clinical psychologist. As a clinician, she worked from 1992-2008 in the open and closed ward at Shalvata Mental Health Center, affiliated with the Sackler School of Medicine at Tel Aviv University. Ophir studied art at Bezalel Academy of Art in Jerusalem and taught psychology and psychoanalysis at the Midrasha Academy of Art. She was a freelance journalist for Yedioth Achronot (1997-2007) and for TimeOut Tel-Aviv and contributed weekly columns to Yediot Achronot America (2010-2012). Before joining NYU, she taught at the Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, and at the Doctoral Studies Program in Clinical Psychology at Long Island University. Ophir is a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association and serves on the IPA Committee on the History of Psychoanalysis since 2015. She is the author of Psychosis, Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry in Postwar America: On the Borderland of Madness (Resling, 2013; Routledge, 2015) and Schizophrenia: An Unfinished History (Polity, 2022).

Schizophrenia- An Unfinished History, Polity Press 2022

On the Borderland of Madness - Psychosis, Psychoanalysis and Psychiatry in Postwar USA, Routledge 2015

“Looking Evil in the I(Eye): Kleinian Thoughts on Love and Forgiveness,” in Hent de Vries and Nils F. Schott, eds., Love and Forgiveness for a More Just World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 110-127

“Loneliness and the Sense of Belonging.” The Candidate, 6 (2015), 1-8

 “Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychotherapy in Institutional Settings – Then and Now,” Editorial for the special edition of the journal Psychosis, entitled Psychosis and Psychoanalysis in the Institutional Culture, November, 2014

On the Borderland of Madness – Psychoanalysis, Psychiatry and Psychosis in Postwar America (1960-2000), in Hebrew (Resling Academic Press, 2013)

José Brunner and Orna Ophir (2011) “In Good Times and in Bad - Discursive Boundaries of Psychoanalysis in Postwar America,” History of Psychiatry, 22 (2), 215-231