Who’s Aaron Balick?

I’m a psychotherapist, author, psychological consultant, and keynote speaker applying depth psychology to the weirdness of modern life.

For over two decades, I’ve worked at the intersection of mind and culture, exploring how our inner worlds are shaped by the systems around us—especially the digital ones. From AI and algorithms to social media and selfhood, I’m interested in what all this tech is doing to our relationships, our attention, and our sense of meaning. I bring clinical experience, academic rigour, and media insight into dialogue with the world we’re living in now: hyperconnected, accelerated, and often disorienting.

After many years as a clinician and academic, I burst into the world of cultural analysis with The Psychodynamics of Social Networking, the first book to apply psychoanalytic theory to social media. Since then I've developed Applied Psychodynamics as a framework for understanding the unconscious forces shaping behaviour across technology and AI, leadership, culture, and modern relationships. I write a monthly psychology column for GQ and have written two self-help books — Keep Your Cool and The Little Book of Calm — driven by my passion for depth psychology and my commitment to making it accessible to everyone.

Do I need to be an expert to understand what you’re writing about?

Absolutely not. My aim here is to share insights in a way that almost anybody can understand. I won’t be dumbing down, and I will be assuming you’re intelligent enough to work things out, but I won’t bedazzle you with jargon (unless I explain it) or put you off with over-abstraction. If I do, tell me and I’ll try harder.

This space is for readers who want to slow down and go deeper—into the psychological forces that drive us, and the cultural ones that distract us. It is for the curiously introspective person who wants to think more deeply about themselves, each other, and the world we live in.

If this speaks to you I hope you’ll join me.