Who’s Aaron Balick?

I’m a psychotherapist, author, and cultural thinker 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, one of the very first books to explore social media from a psychoanalytic perspective. Since then I have gone on to develop all sorts of other applications of psychoanalytic thinking to people, work, and culture, including two self help books that convey my passion for depth psychology and my motivation to make it accessible to all.

So what the hell is Applied Psychodynamics?

Quite simply it is applying ideas from psychoanalysis and depth psychology to everyday things like media, politics, people, work, and culture. It means seeing the and interpreting the world with an eye to unconscious process - how the things we are unaware of underlie everything we do. Think of it like being a psychoanalyst who puts the world on their couch, rather, something specific in the world, to discover more deeply what it’s all about.

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 your 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.