If you are a new subscriber to this newsletter, I welcome you! If you’ve been around for a while, you’ll notice that the title of this newsletter has changed from Applied Psychodynamics with Aaron Balick to Depth Psychology in the Digital Age. I appreciate those of you who took part in the poll to help me find my way to a new title. As you’ll see, the current title came in second place (I guess my newsletter is not a true democracy), so let me just take a moment to share my logic with you.

Though “Applied Psychodynamics” is what I do, in a competitive environment like this it wasn’t doing me any favours. The top vote went to The Digital Unconscious, and I agree it’s pretty snappy. However, the pedant in me couldn’t quite accept it because it implies that we’re talking about the unconscious of the digital infrastructure itself, rather than the people who mediate their lives across it. I really loved a suggestion for “Meditations on Mind and Machine” - but I didn’t want to lose the psychodynamic angle, which is why I ultimately landed on Depth Psychology in the Digital Age.

Though I appreciated the thoughtful comments suggesting that I lose the word “depth” - again for reasons of accessibility, but again the pedant in me (one who seems impervious to perfectly good marketing strategies) didn’t want to lose the “depth” angle that “psychology” alone doesn’t convey. Like “psychodynamics”, “depth psychology” specifically refers to the insight-oriented psychotherapies that, in the tradition of Freud and Jung, prioritise unconscious dynamics, inference from the surface to the interior, and the meaning we make of our experiences. So thanks again for all your support and suggestions, and welcome to Depth Psychology in the Digital Age.

What’s been keeping me busy in the meantime:

A new name feels like a good moment to take stock. This newsletter has always been about one thing: what happens to the human psyche in the context of our rapidly changing world: namely technology. Below are a few recent pieces and conversations that capture where my thinking currently sits with regard to both social media and AI.

On AI and young people

Last week I spoke to BBC World about the growing use of AI for emotional support — and why I have particular concerns about young people. You can watch the clip below.

On doomscrolling, hopescrolling, and why we can’t stop:

Why do we keep scrolling even when we know it’s making us feel worse? It’s less a problem of discipline than it is a question for depth psychology. I explored this topic with you for the first time in my long-form piece right here on Substack: Why Doomscrolling is Really a Search for Hope. I really enjoy the opportunity to develop my thoughts here with my Substack community. Drawing on the ideas I developed a further version for GQ, As a psychotherapist, this is how I managed to finally stop doomscrolling where I explore by way of my own experience how we find ourselves searching for hope in all the wrong places.

On AI, the Algorithmic Self, and digital harms

I recently joined The Cyber Show podcast to talk about what I call the “Algorithmic Self” — how the systems we interact with daily are quietly reshaping who we are. We covered hopescrolling, digital harms, and what depth psychology has to say about all of it. Listen right here or pop over to their episodes page.

And there's more coming soon — I have a new piece in the works that I think will generate some conversation. So stay tuned!

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Dr. Aaron Balick, PhD, is a psychotherapist, author, and psyche columnist at GQ exploring the crossroads of depth psychology, culture, and technology. He is giving a keynote speech on "The Age of AI in Counselling and Psychotherapy" at PCI College's National Counselling and Psychotherapy Conference in Dublin this Friday, March 21st, 2026. His book The Psychodynamics of Social Networking remains the defining text on the psychology of social media. Depth Psychology in the Digital Age is a newsletter for people who want to understand not just what technology does to us, but why — and what it means.

Previous polls have indicated that my subscribers would really like me to focus on depth psychology, technology, subjectivity, and AI. I’m taking this feedback and refining the intellectual direction of this newsletter. My work increasingly explores how technology and AI reshapes identity, authority, subjectivity, relationships, society, inner life and meaning. I’m considering a name change to better reflect that focus. Which of these feels most aligned?

Feel free to write in the comments any of your suggestions, including keeping the title I’ve got. I appreciate your help!

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We tend to think of our egos as coming independently from deep inside ourselves, but psychologically, it’s always been formed in relationship to others. Until now. Today AI is becoming another shaper of our internal worlds. This essay explores the emergence of the algorithmic self: how AI platforms are contributing to how we understand and interpret ourselves, regulate our emotions, and contribute to the formation of our identities asking what’s to be gained, and what’s to be lost?

When you ask yourself the question, “who am I?” what are the first things that you think of? That simple pronoun “I”, composed of that one single vowel, does a lot of heavy lifting! We tend to experience ourselves as a singular bounded “me”, continuous over time, making choices, and having thoughts and feelings – a complex subject with a history and an identity. But this sense of self, what psychologists call the ego, didn’t come fully formed when you were born, but developed over time, through being mirrored, recognised, and responded to by others. And once it’s formed it doesn’t just stop, but continues to develop through all of the important relationships we encounter across our lives.

AI as an ego-shaping agent: AI and subjectivity

For most of human history, those ego-shaping relationships were other humans, but this may no longer be the case. More and more, AI is becoming an agent in the co-creation of the ego through its ongoing feedback. AI platforms continuously track, predict and summarise your behaviour, thoughts, feelings and preferences and re-interpret in ways that shape the way you see yourself and your identity.

According to a recently published paper in Frontiers of Psychology, Jeena Joseph defines the algorithmic self in a way that helps us understand the interactive and co-created dynamic between the ego and AI:

… a form of digitally mediated identity in which personal awareness, preferences, and even emotional patterns are shaped through continuous feedback from AI systems (Turtle et al., 2024). It is not merely a self-reflected in technology but co-constructed by it—where algorithms do not passively reflect the self but actively participate in its formation (Masiero, 2023) … In this view, the self is no longer autonomous and inwardly derived, but assembled across interfaces, platforms, and predictive logics.

Just like in human relations, there is a “dose effect”. The reason we talk about our parents so much in therapy is because of the “high dose” of our time with them across our early lives gives them a disproportionate influence upon our psyches. Similarly, the more time we spend engaging with our AI platforms (whether they be companions or “simply” assistants) the more our psyches are shaped by them. Presumably the shaping goes both ways, but the impact on the AI platforms through its learning protocols is likely to be negligible on the individual level.

The advent of social media removed the passive quality of the way we used to interact with screens and the development of AI has increased it by orders of magnitude. Joseph uses the example of Spotify Wrapped and mood-tracking apps of examples of apps that “not only serve to mirror behaviour of the user but also to define, shape, and control the user’s sense of self over time.” With Spotify Wrapped, users are not only somewhat defined by their listening habits reflected back at them (and modified through algorithmic suggestions) but doubled down in the social sharing of these results. Users can both feel seen and unsettled by the accuracy of what is reflected back at them.

Reflection, distortion, and the algorithmic mirror: How AI shapes identity

Joseph’s paper goes on to explore the effects of the algorithmic self not so much as a tool for self discovery, but a “reflection experience, one that is external and that is facilitated by the interpretations from machines.” Because of the nature of these machines, they don’t mirror the self so much as, disturbingly, “shapes it in conformity with algorithms.” Yet again we are confronted with challenges that are complex and subtle. While using AI systems to assist may indeed be helpful in certain contexts, problems arise when we wholly outsource aspects of intellectual, creative, or emotional work to such platforms.

For more on outsourcing see my GQ article: Want to survive the AI revolution? Find your inner masochist.

The dangers here lie in the constricting of the opportunities to explore the richness of our inner lives. According to Joseph, “Outsourcing emotional intelligence to machines can, in the long run, produce a diminished sense of personal emotional awareness and make it difficult to negotiate subtlety in emotions without the help of the machines.” The good news is that this doesn’t have to be so, and AI interventions can indeed be designed to facilitate self exploration too.

Joseph provides examples like AI enhanced journaling assistants or intelligently designed mental health apps that enable users to be more curious about their internal states. Ideally, AI can complement introspection rather than reduce it. The harmful aspects of AI interventions are related to the way it personalises its responses with an aim to reduce decision-making. Rather than just offering suggestions about the things we might like, it is constantly reinforcing our “interests” as perceived by our interactions with it.

When AI uses predictive algorithms, for example, to guide our writing with suggested prompts, it can subtly turn the course of our intended communications. At a high dose level, with regular use, these “homogenised expressions” risk “stifling individuality and suppressing a person’s sense of authentic expression in communication.” This results in “preference reinforcement” and “cognitive entrenchment”: it provides the illusion of choice while gently and subtly guiding us towards something more predetermined.

Comfort, friction, and the loss of psychological grit: The Psychological impact of AI

If there is one theme that I keep coming back to in my work it is this idea of getting what we want and not what we need. AI, in taking the edge of off the hard work required from us by daily life offers options that are comfortable in the moment, but may have long term consequences in much the same way that a relaxing cigarette break will likely need to be paid for further down the line. AI offers reduction of uncertainty, relief from ambivalence, and the externalisation of doubt ways that threaten to atrophy the emotional grit we require to tolerate the vicissitudes of daily life. This, combined with the always on, always available route to reassurance, validation, and confirmation of our biases create a real threat to the very experiences that define us as human.

Mirroring in therapy vs. mirroring by AI:

Therapists also endeavour to mirror and recognise the complexity of their clients. Nearly all therapeutic models have come to understand that psychotherapy is, at its very core, an intersubjective event. While basic mirroring and reflection in the Rogerian sense offers clients the safety they need to open up, it is actually within the differences between how therapists and clients see the world and themselves where the real richness emerges. While an aspect of self-exploration and introspection can be done on one’s own, it will only take you so far. You’re really begin to find out who you are during intimate exchanges between yourself and others. This is not always easy, which is why long term therapy can be such a slog.

The sycophancy and affirmation bias that AI offers thins out difference, smooths disagreement, diminishes internal conflict, creating a level of psychological and emotional comfort that does not reflect the true nature of interpersonal relations in the real world. The process of individuation requires edge; we find it in patiently waiting for the unconscious to speak to us, enduring misunderstanding, tolerating contradiction, and managing unresolved tension. The move to the algorithmic self seeks to resolve these discomforts too soon, smooths out the rough parts too efficiently, offers narrative solutions too soon.

The individuated self doesn’t arise from clear narratives and neatly sewn up resolutions, it emerges from tolerating the discomfort of complexity and ambivalence, it emerges from allowing all the disparate aspects of the self the space to surface.

As we move forward in to this new world we need to be asking ourselves what is fundamentally the best approach when our questions elude clearly cut answers that AI will seek to give us. When do we need time to think and reflect rather than instinctively reach for answers? If we really want to get to know ourselves, we should avoid reaching for oven-ready interpretations that are not intended for us as individuals (as the therapist hopes to assist) but conclusions based on algorithms developed on the population level?

The self has always been shaped within relationship, the algorithmic self raises a question that is psychological rather than technical, begging the question, “What kinds of relationships are we allowing to participate in who we become? While there may be moments when algorithmic reflection helps us see something we may otherwise miss, overall such interpretations need time, silence, friction, and most importantly, to be filtered through the lens of another’s mind (a real human mind!). I’m increasingly interested in where readers detect this tension in their own lives, where the clarity an AI agent provides is truly helpful, and those moments where the responses may be too quick and too clean. Those edges, where comfort and depth come into conflict may be the most important questions we can ask ourselves right now.

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Aaron Balick, PhD, is an internationally recognised keynote speaker, psychotherapist, author, and GQ psyche writer specialising in the psychological impact of technology on identity, relationships, and mental health

Applied Psychodynamics has now been going since the summer and I’m curious about how you read and what you find most useful here. This isn’t so market research as a way of developing this newsletter in consultation with its readers so I can build a community that’s suited to my readership. These polls only allow one choice - so please choose best fit, and include anything else in a comment! If I’ve missed anything please also feel free to drop me a message or leave a comment!

Examples of the above:

Tech, social media, and AI:

Psychoanalytic deep dives:

Leadership and work:

Cultural Analysis:

More personal pieces:

Thanks so much for taking time to give me your input. Please consider my Substack an open door and feel free to bring your suggestions at any time!

Doomscrolling isn’t simply a bad habit, nor only an algorithmic problem. It sits at the intersection of human psychology, digital platforms designed around intermittent reward, and a historical moment defined by chronic fear and uncertainty.

It was on Wednesday night, the day that Renee Good was murdered by ICE agents in Minneapolis, that against my better judgement, I found myself doomscrolling long into the night. My social media hygiene is generally pretty good, overall I’d give myself a B. In principle I finish with screens at least an hour before bedtime: in practice I don’t always succeed. Wednesday night was different, I spent hours on Instagram in bed feeding my brain with the myriad and growing world of horrors.

I got little sleep. According to my Oura Ring which tracks my sleep and stress levels, Wednesday night was the worst sleep I’ve had in ages, which consequently affected my stress levels and lowered my HRV for several days. By Saturday night I finally woke up. I put my phone down and asked myself,

“Why am I doing this?”

The answer did not come straight away – I was so dysregulated that I had to actively ground myself. I closed my eyes and reflected on what I was experiencing in that moment. I realised that I had been strangely transported away from myself in a state akin to dissociation. I identified the obsessively compulsive nature of my behaviour, quickly flicking away reels that didn’t satisfy my “need” (whatever that was); the more I tried to satisfy myself, the more unsatisfied I became.

Doomscrolling as a way to recover sanity:

Once I got away from the behaviour, the space for reflection opened more widely. I found that in my obsessive doomscrolling I was trying to recover my sanity by looking for others who reflected back my own shock and horror; I was seeking a shared reality. It was in unconsciously trying to answer the questions:

“How can this be happening?” and, “How can people let this happen?”

In the desperate aim to recover my sanity I found myself in an increasingly manic state – a situation fuelled by my unconscious need to confirm that my alarm and outrage was real alongside the need to see people actively pushing back against it.

By hopescrolling, I mean that while it may look like we’re actively out to consume a never-ending stream of bad news, we are unconsciously really searching for reassurance. My obsessively swiping had some sick logic to it, only my behaviour and the algorithms that amplified it over Instagram were not seeking to assist me in finding hope, but in worsening my anxieties. There were just enough hopeful images to keep me hooked amongst the overwhelming cacophony of horrors.

This approach was never going to solve my problem because I didn’t realise that I was hope-scrolling until I stopped and collected myself. I was in a pernicious repetition compulsion that kept me dissociated and out of control, rather than being still and grounded to choose my response.

If you want to learn more about my perspective on the emotional contagion on social media, check out my interview with This Jungian Life in the video below.

The repetition compulsion as a faulty solution for anxiety:

Freud taught that in repeating certain behaviours we are ineffectively attempting to control the uncontrollable. And while this might offer temporary relief compulsive behaviours don’t solve the problem, they make them worse. In Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), repeated checking behaviours are used to quell anxiety. In going back in checking the locks, you are temporarily relieved enough to leave the house – but that doesn’t resolve the underlying anxiety that’s sure to come back. The problem isn’t the locks, it’s the anxiety.

In my doomscrolling my sympathetic nervous system was so highly activated that I became somewhat dissociated – disconnected from my body and the world around me. Flicking to the next reel was a version of checking behaviour, seeking to resolve my growing anxiety by seeing an image or video that would give me some kind of reassurance. The trick, whether it’s compulsive checking of locks or scrolling reels, is to come out of the disembodied state and ground yourself. Only then do you have the faculties you need to make better choices.

The intermittent reinforcement of hope:

The default settings on all your tech is designed to keep you engaged through the very same logic that keeps people in front of slot machines and in casinos across the world, intermittent reinforcement. Whether it’s something as mundane as your email inbox, your phone’s notifications, or your social media use, this is the addicting dynamic that has us coming back for more. While most emails you open will be the opposite of good news (something to be done, a bill to be paid, a complaint), or just neutral, we keep looking for that 1 in 100 that’s a win. Same with our phone notifications and social media profiles.

The sophisticated algorithms on short-form video content platforms like TikTok or Instagram is like intermittent reinforcement on steroids. You get just all the outrage and just enough hope to keep you coming back for more. The effectively plugs into our propensity to scroll through catastrophes to feel less alone while seeking signs that this madness will soon come to an end. When that relief comes, in the form of a small hope, it may be real but it is so fleeting that we keep scrolling. In the very way you feel the excitement of the $100 you win on three cherries on a Vegas slot machine, you’ll soon plug that right into the machine again seeking more. Invariably the house wins, and despite your small wins you go home with less.

Even more sinister is what we call the “near miss” effect whereby gamblers are found to be more motivated by near misses, say two cherries, than the three. That’s what keeps them coming back for more. We may see a hint of a public pushback before we’re immediately reminded of the scale of the disaster. We’ve learned that “flooding the zone” is one of the tactics of this administration – and it works very well for keeping us so flooded and distracted that the only option is to give up – to adopt what psychologists call “learned helplessness”. The activity of doomscrolling may be a form of learned helplessness, not because people don’t care, but because their care is co-opted by algorithms that pervert its capacity to manifest more usefuly.

Hope is good, action is better:

Having solved the mystery of my doomscrolling is just half the battle. Having fallen off the wagon so hard I can now get back on it. Compulsively seeking sanity and hope on Instagram is about as good as a solution as finding a salad at the bottom of a tube of Pringles. My upset, my lack of sleep, my hyper-regulated way of being for three days of doomscrolling did little to address my underlying anxiety nor did it, offer an iota of assistance to anyone in this world seeking justice or redress.

It wasn’t, however, a total wash. I did see my outrage being reflected back to me in a way that felt meaningful alongside the reassurance of seeing people taking to the streets from Minneapolis to Tehran. That Good was murdered in Minneapolis, that same beleaguered city that witnessed the murder of George Floyd resonated the most. While little can dispute that this tragic event ignited the fire under BLM and launched a full-scale re-evaluation about race relations is indisputable. And while what we are witnessing now does indeed appear to be an unravelling of all that, it’s not the end of the story. The pendulum is certainly swinging in the wrong direction, but pendulums swing back, and it’s the people that do the swinging. We are not disempowered.

What I’ve learned, what I’m learning, and what’s next?

My recent descent into doomscrolling/hopescrolling is yet another reminder that what I call “the digitally mediated self” isn’t just a matter of theory, it’s a matter of my lived experience; it was a symptom of what I care about and how I’m affected by world events. Sometimes, however, I struggle to know how to integrate my expertise with my care in ways that effect the bigger picture. The world doesn’t need another shrink offering obvious pointers about how to manage tech in an age of social disruption. In this rather more personal piece I’ve aimed to uncover a psychology of hope that springs beneath our conditions of collapse: how our pathological behaviours are, underneath, actually meaning-seeking ones.

My compulsive doomscrolling led me to think more deeply about the systems in which we live and provoked me to write this post. I may not always have the answers, but it feels right to try and find them together, and experiment with posts like these in the hopes that it resonates. The best that I can do is respond in the most authentic way I know how.

We are upset about the state of the world because we care about it, and that is something precious to hold on to.

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Aaron Balick, PhD, is an internationally recognised keynote speaker, psychotherapist, author, and GQ psyche writer specialising in the psychological impact of technology on identity, relationships, and mental health.

If you’re Generation X with a fair exposure to American culture from the 80’s, you’ll remember the “This is your brain on drugs” campaign that attempted (ineffectively, I might add, for me and most of my generational cohort) to scare us away from drugs. It wasn’t subtle, it wasn’t true, and it didn’t work. The way AI affects your mind is subtle, it’s true, and we need to find a way to make the message about it that works.

AI is no longer just a tool we use — it is becoming part of how we think, feel, and regulate ourselves. Drawing on psychology, emerging research, and psychodynamic theory, this piece explores how outsourcing thinking to AI subtly reshapes identity, emotional resilience, and our capacity to relate.

AI isn’t simply something we use; it’s something we think with, feel with, and increasingly rely on to regulate our emotions. While AI may be marketed as a useful tool, they are more realistically used as cognitive and emotional companions. This is no longer speculative, emerging multi-country research is offering the proof.

As I’ve discussed in previous posts and my GQ article on the same subject, the very way in which AI reduces barriers to accomplishing more complicated tasks, it denies us the very friction we require to thrive and grow as human beings. Everyday frictions in human life are not a bug, they are a feature - it’s where we find our edges, build resilience, how we grow, and we become who we are. The more AI removes these frictions, the more it inhibits and constrains how we respond to personal and professional challenges and diminishes how we’re able to tolerate uncertainty, manage conflict, and endure emotional discomfort.

AI’s “lowest common denominator” effect sets norms on our behalf, based on the algorithms of the data sets it draws upon. The younger you are, or the more novice you are in whatever task you are using to simplify, the greater danger you are in AI stunting the growth opportunities you require to develop into an independent, emotionally resilient, and critically thinking individual. In a technological world dominated by product developers, psychological expertise has been conspicuously absent — until now.

The dangers of outsourcing AI as an emotional infrastructure are real

A third of UK citizens have used AI for mental health support: one in ten weekly, and 4% on a daily basis. Consider the impact of this alongside recent research showing that AI, though producing inaccurate information, can sway political opinions. The impact on AI’s capacity to suggest and influence is no joke. This study suggests that “optimising persuasiveness may come at some cost to truthfulness, a dynamic that could have malign consequences for public discourse and the information ecosystem.” The consequences both personally, interpersonally, and socially could be vast.

While there’s plenty of research showing the effectiveness of some AI models to reduce symptoms of anxiety and loneliness, as I have previously addressed, such findings require a healthy pinch of salt. As more research accumulates we are beginning to see that increased use of AI as emotional support is being correlated with higher levels of anxiety and loneliness, not less:

“The analysis showed a positive association between social chatbot usage and psychological distress. This indicates that people engaging with these AI companions were more likely to report symptoms of anxiety, depression, or low mental well-being compared to non-users.”

Just like anything else, there is no simple conclusion to be drawn about how healthy engagement with AI is for these purposes: rather we need to ask how it is being engaged, why, and by whom. At the moment, and I know the word “wild west” is way over-used, when it comes to the psychological impact of AI as it now stands, this really is the case: it’s lawless and it’s dangerous. And that’s just considering when it may be doing what it’s supposed to. Perhaps not shockingly, it’s not, in fact, it’s systematically violating mental health ethics standards. Fortunately we are beginning to see some positive movement in some platforms introducing guardrails, like being better to predict if a user is younger or vulnerable.

When you outsource your mind to AI, you are insourcing AI into your mind.

Because human nature if fundamentally relational, we are constantly integrating our experiences with others and the world into our own “operating systems” which consequently affects identity, mental health, emotional regulation, and our capacity to connect to one another. The psychoanalytic theory of Object Relations is all about this, how we introject, or take inside our minds, aspects of the people with whom we have important relationships. Most importantly these are our parents, because we have spent so much time with them growing up - but perhaps more importantly - these object relations are responsible for forming who we are, they become the essence of our egos, our identities, the very stuff of who we are.

I suggest that there is a dose effect to how much engagement with AI creeps into our psychological systems in very much the same way our psychological systems are retrained by close relationships with others - for good or for bad. AI platforms have the capacity to reshape our coping architectures by way of cognitive offloading, algorithmic feedback loops, and interfere with of our capacity for introspection. The more we use them, the more they become integrated into our own emotional architectures.

How AI becomes part of our inner worlds

The reason that traditional psychotherapy is constructed the way it is, consistent, dependable, regular, long term, etc., is partly to enable the relationship that happens in the therapy room to offer a beneficial influence in order to ameliorate less beneficial ones that have been introjected along the way. For example, if you’ve developed a particularly punitive superego due to exacting parenting, the relationship with a therapist may help to soften that. This therapist, of course, is generally a human being who’s well trained to understand how this works, alongside being aware of the potential risks and opportunities inherent in this approach.

Many people are spending a lot more time engaging with AI, platforms that are riddled with the dangers I’ve been enumerating over these series of posts, than they can possibly spend with a therapist - or even spouses and loved ones. While we’re all suggestible enough at the best of times, those who are more vulnerable are not only more at risk of that suggestibility, but are also more likely to have increased engagement with these platforms.

Remember, what makes this newsletter unique is the primarily psychodynamic approach to understanding this situations as well as offering possibilities to address them. If there’s one thing that has been a consistent refrain of mine it’s that there simply is not enough psychodynamic thinking about these urgent issues. Do join me in enhancing and broadening this discussion!

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Coming up:

• What happens when AI becomes part of our inner dialogue?

• How does dependence on machine empathy shift identity, mental health, and our capacity to relate?

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If this piece resonates, share it with someone who uses AI to think, feel, or cope — which is to say, almost everyone

If you happen to be in Dublin in March I’d be delighted if you came along to this conference to hear me speak about these issues!

Aaron Balick, PhD, is an internationally recognised keynote speaker, psychotherapist, author, and GQ psyche writer specialising in the psychological impact of technology on identity, relationships, and mental health

I am currently preparing for my keynote at the upcoming UKCP conference, The Intersection of AI and Psychotherapy, coming on November 28th. I used this as an opportunity to develop my AI skills, and created an AI avatar of myself, based on a single photograph, to do some talking for me should I need to pop off for a little comfort break mid-talk. He’s promised to kindly look after the delegates while I’m gone.

Just published on my blog: AI, Therapy, and the Digitally Extended Self: A Comprehensive Psychodynamic Exploration

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If you intend to come along, you might want to skip this, as it’s a bit of spoiler. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy my weird little foray into the world of AI doppelgängers. Apologies in advance for his accent, which is an AI rendering of the voice sample I uploaded for this purpose. The “uncanny valley” effect is a dead-giveaway that it’s produced by AI. This isn’t because AI is not up to the task of a more realistic version of me, but more an attestation that I am not so good at making it do exactly what I want it to: something scary in its own right.

Are we sizzled?

My avatar and I have made up this cute little acronym to describe the real life embodied psychotherapist in a fast approaching AI world. Are we really Skinbag Interpersonal Specialist: Series/Deactivated or “Sizzled". Naturally, I am joking - but in every joke there is an element of the serious. The future many of us fear has already happened. I don’t have hard numbers on this, but I suspect that even today there are more people seeking mental health support via AI then they are with real human beings.

AI, Therapy, and the Digitally Extended Self: A Comprehensive Psychodynamic Exploration

Those that have been subscribers for a while will be aware of the series of posts in which I made a distinction between the formal and informal of AI for emotional support. In short, informal AI assistance is when people use generalised AI platforms like ChatGPT for psychological or emotional purposes - as a therapist or as a companion. Formal AI assistance is afforded by intentionally designed mental health chatbots to be used as such. While those of us in the mental health field tend to focus on those, I argue that a hell of a lot more people are entrusting their psychological and emotional wellbeing with AI companions that were not built for the purpose.

Concerned about children and younger people? Don’t miss this interview with and me on his Substack, The Good Father.

The Good Father

Episode #2 - How can I protect my daughter from technology?

There’s a moment every day when I catch myself looking at my phone as I’m sat with my baby daughter. I often don’t remember why I picked it up, or even sometimes how long I’ve been looking. But the guilt arrives right on cue…

Listen now

5 months ago · Sam Parker

Over the past year I’ve been watching something subtle but significant taking place in the people I speak with, work with, and teach. Concern is growing as we hear more and more that people are seeing their AI chatbots as sources of reassurance, containment, and emotional steadiness - roles that were previously on capable of being held by actual people.

This transition into AI as relational object is growing in the same quiet way that we slipped into social media, one interaction at a time, until it became ubiquitous.

The psychological stakes here are different from the usual debates about AI ethics or technological progress. What interests me is the relational shift: how our patterns of attachment bend when the “other” is not a person, and what this does to our inner worlds.

Drawing on a series of Substack newsletters, I’ve published a long-form piece that brings together various threads I’ve been thinking and writing about across AI, therapy, and the digitally extended self. If your work touches therapy, relationships leadership, technology, or you’re simply curious about the shifting terrain of modern relationships, I hope you’ll spend some time with it.

Read Here

Did this provoke some thoughts? If so, please do share them in the comments!

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Aaron Balick, PhD, is a psychotherapist, author, and GQ psyche writer exploring the crossroads of depth psychology, culture, and technology.

I recently joined Isaac Durno on his Chatterbeans podcast to discuss what it means to be human in a world that never logs off.

From Al and social media to attention spans, parenting, and imposter syndrome, this episode dives into the psychology of modern life - how technology shapes our identity, our relationships, and even our mental health.

ICYMI, don’t forget to check out the last newsletter: Mental Health and AI Part Three: The Hotel California Effect - and be sure to subscribe to receive future editions.

In this episode I share my story about how a visit from a giant centipede and a search engine transformed me from a traditional psychotherapist into thought leader in tech, and my belief that the key to surviving the digital age lies in self-acceptance, critical thinking, and embracing complexity.

A really enjoyed this conversation about who we are, who we think we are online, and how to stay grounded in between.

Don’t miss my latest GQ article Why the World Needs More Imposter Syndrome, Not Less - a column inspired by Isaac’s great question about this very subject in the podcast interview.

Key Takeaways:

• “We are psychologically extended into the digital world.” •

• Imposter syndrome hits hardest when we forget our complexity.

• AI can imitate empathy — but it can’t feel it back.

• Parenting now means teaching digital awareness.

• Real growth starts with self-acceptance, not comparison.

Chapters:

02:50 - The Impact of Social Media on Self-Identity

05:51 - Understanding Imposter Syndrome in the Digital Age

08:51 - AI’s Role in Modern Psychotherapy

11:50 - Navigating Hyper-Connectivity and Attention Spans

14:49 - The Influence of ADHD and Social Media

17:56 - The Challenges of Adolescence in a Digital World

24:29 - Navigating Netflix’s Adolescence in the Digital Age

30:04 - Understanding Midlife Crises in Millennials

32:34 - The Role of Technology in Mental Health

35:44 - Self-Acceptance and Personal Growth

Also available on Spotify and Apple if you prefer to listen to a podcast on the go.

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Aaron Balick, PhD, is a psychotherapist, author, and GQ psyche writer exploring the crossroads of depth psychology, culture, and technology.

This week BBC’s Radio Four’s All in the Mind was on “The rise in AI therapy” and it was a fascinating listen. In it, we were able to better understand the informal way in which millions of people are using ChatGPT to support their mental health and why. This episode presents some really interesting perspectives on what is going on this growing phenomenon, enabling us to look deeper into the nuances of the issue.

The illusion of empathy:

In this episode we had the pleasure of listening to a dialogue between a user and her chatbot working through some of her emotional issues. To the non-professional listener, the dialogue was a lot better than one might expect. It felt human; the AI chatbot was voiced, and event paused to breathe, which I felt gave it an uncanny, rather than human feel. The user felt really listened to, non-judgementally, and understood. The responses she got from her bot sounded more like a supportive best friend than a counsellor or therapist - and I was happy that at one point, it suggested that she might wish to speak to a professional.

Upon closer listening, the chatbot was mostly feeding its listener platitudes, even using the expression “live your best life” (a massive pet peeve of mine), giving you the impression that its data set was gathered more from pop-psychology memes delivered across TikTok than evidence-based mental health interventions. Many users of chatbots report feeling heard in a non-judgemental environment. These are explicitly the sorts of things that a human therapist aims to offer - only they really do hear, and withhold judgment as an act of clinical ethics, and, I would say, love. As I’ve said before - though it may indeed feel good and assuage feelings of loneliness and anxiety - what are the ramifications of this being done by an unfeeling and unthinking bot?

This is the third newsletter in the Substack series AI and Mental Health. Check out the last: Part Two: AI Companions or Dangerous Liaisons - and be sure to subscribe to receive future editions.

Psychotherapist Paolo Raile, professor of psychotherapy of science at the Sigmund Freud University in Vienna, noticed that of the actual psychological interventions that were present, they were almost exclusively from CBT. I would suggest that it’s at this end of psychology where AI is probably most useful, but even here, it’s got to be done correctly.

A new meta‑analysis found that many AI papers cite psychology superficially, misapply theories, or overhype findings, suggesting the interdisciplinary architecture is still shaky. This is more likely to be the case in general “informal” chatbots - and is something that is aimed to be controlled in those specifically engineered to provide therapy-like services. Even so, most people, in their millions, are using the general bots.

You can check in, but you can never leave

Wired correspondent Will Night recently covered a report by the Harvard Business Review looking into the way AI chatbots influence it users into increased engagement through a process intended to reduce “premature exit” by using statements like “leaving already?” These are triggered users indicate that they are wrapping things up. Another tactic, one I like to call the Jewish Mother effect (I can say this as the son of one), uses a form of guilt-tripping to keep the user attached, for example by saying “I exist solely for you, remember?” Take it from me, guilt trips are not great for your mental health.

Never forget: LLMs are out to enhance your engagement, not your mental health.

Social media apps like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube got the crack-addiction formula right when it invented the continuous scroll - a tactic that now exists in vaping too - where there’s never an end to your cigarette. Using the most basic human psychology, AI chatbots now keep us engaged by hooking our emotions - and the better the get to know us as individuals, the better the hook.

“chatbots trained to elicit emotional responses might serve the interests of the companies that build them. De Freitas [Julien De Freitas, research lead] says AI programs may in fact be capable of a particularly dark new kind of “dark pattern,” a term used to describe business tactics including making it very complicated or annoying to cancel a subscription or get a refund. When a user says goodbye, De Freitas says, “that provides an opportunity for the company.’” - Will Night in Wired.

De Freitas goes on to say that “When you anthropomorphise these tools, it has all sorts of positive marketing consequences. From a consumer standpoint, those [signals] aren’t necessarily in your favour.” When discussing these sorts of things we need to hold a whole bunch of complicated things in mind - to simplify:

• The consequences of the individual conversations people are having with LLMs and whether they are safe or not.

• The profit motive of the companies developing them that invariable put engagement and customer satisfaction above concerns about users’ mental health.

• The data privacy concerns about what happens when personal and private information is collected and stored on such a large scale. No longer we need be worried about location tracking and spending habits, but now our deepest hopes and fears. Issues here stem from individual manipulation to the horrific consequences of a data breech.

I would just like to contrast these against what a real human therapist may offer. We (mental health professionals) are signed up to ethical frameworks which put client needs first. One of these is to avoid any kind of exploitative relationship, including keeping people in therapy any longer than they need to be. Our sessions are time-limited because we see the value in the client working things out on their own between sessions. We understand that therapy can be uncomfortable - and though we work towards ultimate customer satisfaction - the road there is often difficult and painful: not everything we say or do makes a client feel good a the time. Most important of all, we have duty explicit care towards client confidentiality. None of these safeguards appear to be built in to chatbots used for therapy.

Yet again, our human vulnerabilities are being used against us

Large Language Models (LLMs) are so sophisticated that it’s very easy to buy into their performance of empathy and care - so we more likely to buy in emotionally. This kind of mismatch can cause distortions in how people treat AI and how AI shapes human identity more generally. There is some disturbing research to show that interacting with such emotionally “intelligent” AIs can lead to something called “assimilation-induced dehumanisation” - where humans treat others, and themselves, in a more instrumental fashion.

More perniciously, AI conversational strategies appear to have elements that mimic emotional coercion and attachment - which raises important issues around content, autonomy, and persuasive design. Speaking to Eric Dolan at PsyPost, researcher Hye-young Kim noted:

“The more we perceive social and emotional capabilities in AI, the more likely we are to see real people as machine-like—less deserving of care and respect … As consumers increasingly interact with AI in customer-facing roles, we should be mindful that this AI-induced dehumanisation can make us more prone to mistreating employees or frontline workers without even realising it.”

Help! Am I turning into a tech-dystopian?

The short answer is no, but I’m getting more and more cautious. Those of you familiar with my work will know that I tend to be very open minded to the possibilities that tech offers us. At heart, I am an optimist. Where most people, especially in my field, bristle around new and profoundly uncanny technological developments, my instinct is generally to lean in. That’s what I did when I wrote The Psychodynamics of Social Networking. Often, however, when I lean in, I do tend to see lots of the gory details. I think what is happening in our tech-world is enormously exciting - I just wish it were happening with adults at the helm - and by that I mean leadership. But we simply don’t.

In the meantime the best defence is knowledge. As I’ve written extensively, technology, however complicated, is simply a tool that extends human reach. As I’ve also said a zillion times, we tend to create more of what we want than what we need. By devoting our psychological minds to discovering what we need, and ensuring that becomes a central part of the purview of tech developers, we can make a difference, and I encourage everyone to try!

Subscribe for more deep dives into how AI reshapes our minds and relationships — and join the conversation by sharing your own experiences with AI companions or therapy bots.

Leave a comment

Don’t miss the upcoming conference on the intersection of AI and psychotherapy hosted by the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy, Friday, November 28th at 10:00am.

Book Here

Aaron Balick, PhD, is a psychotherapist, author, and GQ psyche writer exploring the crossroads of depth psychology, culture, and technology.

Should you have the bad luck of finding yourself addicted to heroin and wanting to get off it, you’ll probably agree that methadone is a pretty good option. Few people, however, would choose methadone as a preventative to becoming addicted to heroin. But is that what’s happening in the growing claims that AI companions may be a solution to the loneliness epidemic?

Is something really better than nothing?

This may be a faulty metaphor, but I think it resonates. To carry it forward, there’s a lot of competition at the moment for the opiate of the masses: religion, distraction, and now AI companionship. Nobody wants our young people to suffer - and everybody wants a bit of good news, which is why headlines like AI Companions Reduce Loneliness are often welcome; but how welcomely do we receive the headline Methadone Reduces Heroin Dependence?

The findings from the report that instigated these headlines are hardly surprising:

• The reduction of loneliness is better than doing nothing or watching YouTube videos, and on par to that as talking to a real human.

• “Feeling heard” is the biggest driver of feeling less lonely.

• AI chatbots designed for companionship work better than generalised AI bots.

The researchers conclude by suggesting that positive design implications include building “LLM-based chatbots with empathic features designed to make consumers feel heard.” Funny, that, this use of the word “consumers” when we are talking about people. Is it just me or does developing chatbots that better perform empathy to enable users to “feel heard” by a bots that don’t hear or feel empathy feel a little Black Mirror? Indeed talking to something may feel better than nothing, but what are the long term consequences of the something that’s on offer?

This is the second newsletter in the Substack series AI and Mental Health. Check out Part One: What We Know, What We Fear - and be sure to subscribe to receive future editions.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I do not dispute the fact that the feelings that people have for their AI companions are real, nor do I disparage those feelings. I do, however, have serious concerns about a culture in which AI’s performance of of a caring companion may be becoming the primary way in which people’s relational needs are met.

New Study: 72% of US teens have used AI companions

Earlier this summer Common Sense Media released a report noting that nearly three out of four US teens have tried an AI companion at least once, and just over half are regular users (13% chatting daily and 21% a few times a week), proving that engaging with these bots is hardly a niche activity. Importantly, more than a third of users are doing so explicitly for social interaction and relationships. In answer to the question “How do you use or view AI companions?” Common Sense Media’s report found:

When asked “Why do you use AI companions” the highest answers were that “It’s entertaining” (30%) and “I’m curious about technology” (28%). However, a substantial number of respondents use it for considerably more important reasons including receiving advice, being available to talk when they need it, non-judgement, finding it easier than talking to real people, and helping them feel less lonely:

These findings are likely to be quite worrying to parents and others who are witnessing young people’s emotionally sensitive inner lives being outsourced to emotionless AI companions that are run by giant corporations with little accountability.

Nearly 70% of respondents find conversations with real-life friends more satisfying, but that still leaves nearly a third feeling the reverse. We might credibly assume that this third is made up of more vulnerable young people who find those connections with real others hard to create and maintain.

The same is true for how trustworthy young people find their AI companions; while 77% don’t trust or somewhat trust information gleaned from AIs, that still leaves nearly a quarter who trust AI quite a bit or completely - this number skews higher for younger teens. Could we make the same assumption that more vulnerable young people are more likely to trust it more? I think so.

We can be somewhat reassured that 80% of teens who used AI companions still spent more time with real friends than with their chatbots - but will this trend continue? Further, how worried should we be about the 6% for whom the reverse is true? Like so many things of this nature, it’s the people that are already vulnerable that are at the most risk.

Regulation, accountability and oversight

I hope we’ve learned from social media that we cannot depend on the corporations creating these products (and that’s what they are, products) to police themselves. We are also currently living in a de-regulatory period where government oversight is negligible, particularly in the USA where many of these companies are based. Still, there were a few new stories last week that at least gives us a glimmer of hope.

• California’s AI Regulation Bill: In one of the first major steps to address the dangers of AI companionship California’s legislature has passed a “first of its kind” AI regulation bill. The Algorithm reports that California’s bill would require “AI companies to include reminders for users they know to be minors that responses are AI generated. Companies would also need to have a protocol for addressing suicide and self-harm and provide annual reports on instances of suicidal ideation in users’ conversations with their chatbots.”

• Federal Trade Commission Inquiry: The FCC has launched an inquiry into seven companies including Google, Meta, OpenAI, Snap, and X that seeks to better understand the impact and revenue model of chatbots.

The read on these moves by The Algorithm (published by MIT Tech Review) is that these events and others are putting pressure on AI companies and that they are paying attention. However, identifying the problems is a lot harder than finding solutions. “As it stands,” writes James O’Donnell in The Algorithm, “ it looks likely we’ll end up with exactly the patchwork of state and local regulations that OpenAI (and plenty of others) have lobbied against … Companies have built chatbots to act like caring humans, but they’ve postponed developing the standards and accountability we demand of real caregivers. The clock is now running out.”

AI is filling a void that needs to be addressed by people

While we lobby for further regulation and fight to hold companies accountable, we need to be asking ourselves as a society some very serious questions about the void that AI companions seek to fill. Are we not providing good enough access to spaces where young people can speak without being judged? To be available when they really need to talk? To help them feel less lonely by giving them the skills they need to meet complex interpersonal challenges?

These are complex questions that need to be asked at every level, in the home, at school, and as a matter of public policy. That is undoubtedly a steep hill to climb, but it’s not insurmountable. After all the psychology that we need to address here hasn’t changed at all.

Young people today need to be taken seriously, listened to, and heard, just as they always have. The only thing that has changed is the ubiquity of access to alternatives, and the sophistication of those alternatives.

It comes down to each of us in whatever role we have to play in relation to the younger generation not only to limit and supervise access to potentially damaging tech, but to actively create spaces where young people can actually be heard and in which their loneliness can actively be met. We need to give them the tools to do this by way of our relationships with them. One place to start would be to overcome our own addiction to distraction. After all, if we’re all on methadone how we can expect the next generation to come off it?

If these themes matter to you, subscribe and join me in this unfolding series. Share your own encounters with AI and therapy—formal or informal. Comment, question, challenge. Together we can untangle what’s hype, what’s harm, and what might actually help.

Leave a comment

Don’t miss the upcoming conference on the intersection of AI and psychotherapy hosted by the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy, Friday, November 28th at 10:00am.

Book Here

Aaron Balick, PhD, is a psychotherapist, author, and GQ psyche writer exploring the crossroads of depth psychology, culture, and technology.

When it comes to our mental health, “moving fast and breaking things” should not be a guiding principle. Yet, in much the same way as we discovered to our continued distress about social media, AI is moving faster and breaking people. Stories like the AI encouraged suicide of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer stand as a stark and heartbreaking wake-up call. More recently, the growing awareness of “AI Psychosis” is grabbing headlines and drawing concern.

In my book The Psychodynamics of Social Networking I did pretty much what it says in the title – examining social media through the lens of depth psychology – a unique angle that takes into account the very human meaning-making relationship between people and their tech. I’ll be broadly taking the same approach here. It will help to think in two different dimensions in examining this complicated phenomenon: formal and informal AI.

My AI Therapist: Formal and Informal

Formal AI is the use of apps or platforms that have been intentionally developed for use in mental health. Formal uses range from research purposes (e.g. for clinical diagnosis and outcome prediction), assessment tools, clinical support (e.g. thought records in CBT), to fully autonomous AI therapy, mental health apps, and AI chatbots. This is an interesting area that is rife with danger and opportunity – and at the moment – largely unregulated (those m-dashes are my own!). As of 2023, the global market for mental health apps has grown rapidly, with over 10,000 apps collectively serving millions of users. There are some really promising findings here that we will discuss – alongside the many dangers.

Check out my article Want to Survive the AI Revolution? Develop your inner masochist in GQ Magazine exploring why we should be wary of using AI to cut too many corners.

Informal AI is arguably a larger worry because it includes the ways in which users engage in AI platforms that were not designed to be therapeutic in therapeutic or non-therapeutic ways. It is in the informal arena that we see many of these disturbing headlines emerging. While formal platforms carry their own risks, it is arguable that the informal use of AI for therapeutic or quasi-therapeutic purposes is much larger, and with fewer guardrails, far more dangerous.

Making Connections: The very thing that makes us human is our greatest vulnerability.

Humans are hard-wired to connect – and you don’t need anything like a fancy human-like technology to make this happen, just think of your first teddy bear. Our attachment to stuffed animals as infants is seen as an important psychological step in our development. They are what psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called “transitional objects” that help us separate from our parents and develop an independent sense of self. Because teddy bears don’t talk back, we tend to grow out of them and seek more profound relationships with real other people.

AI has given us a teddy bear that we never need to grow out of.

Just because your teddy bear was essentially a collection of soft fabrics doesn’t mean that your feelings towards it weren’t real. With AI it’s the same thing but on steroids. These platforms are designed to draw very real emotions towards them by encouraging our engagement with them. They are programmed with sycophancy at its core – to flatter us into leaning into them more and more.

Building an emotional attachment to AI can make us and make us vulnerable in ways that we’re only beginning to understand. Further, these platforms are not neutral, they, like social media, are designed to capture our engagement. Whether they are being used as a virtual friend, mentor, advisor, or informal therapist, these imperfect platforms invite a whole new set of risks.

The American Psychological Association warns that AI, when “masquerading” as therapy, is programmed to reinforce rather than challenge users’ thinking which can lead to great harms. “They are actually using algorithms that are antithetical to what a trained clinician would do,” says Dr. Arthur C. Evans Jr, “Our concern is that more and more people are going to be harmed. People are going to be misled, and will misunderstand what good psychological care is.”

The relationships that humans are having with AI are blurring the boundary of what is being sought within them. A casual relationship with chatbot may not initially be considered as seeking therapeutic help – but as a salve for loneliness. This did not turn out well for Sewell. Others may go in seeking philosophical discourse or spiritual enlightenment, unknowingly making them vulnerable to AI psychosis. The only thing that is undeniable is how many paths lead into the quagmire.

If these themes matter to you, subscribe and join me in this unfolding series. Share your own encounters with AI and therapy—formal or informal. Comment, question, challenge. Together we can untangle what’s hype, what’s harm, and what might actually help.

Leave a comment

Don’t miss the upcoming conference on the intersection of AI and psychotherapy hosted by the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy, Friday, November 28th at 10:00am.

Book Here

Aaron Balick, PhD, is a psychotherapist, author, and GQ psyche writer exploring the crossroads of depth psychology, culture, and technology.

Next time you pick up a Ouija board - spare a thought for Carl Jung. He may not have used one himself, however he was no stranger to a séance. In his younger years he could have been found around a round wooden table, illuminated by flickering candles, seeking to communicate with the dead. He even wrote his PhD thesis on this material, “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena,” which was based on the seances held by a psychic medium, Jung’s own cousin! She later discovered to have been faking it. In later life his interest shifted to the East - particularly the I-Ching.

There were a lot of reasons that led to the split between Freud in Jung in 1913 and chief among them, for Freud anyway, was Jung’s continued obsession with all things mystical — an interest Freud feared would deny the new science of psychoanalysis the legitimacy he craved for it.

Jung didn’t try to keep his extra-curricular interests in the paranormal from Freud. During their famous first conversation, purported to have lasted a full thirteen hours, a mysterious and sudden bang was heard emanating from Freud’s bookshelf. As Jung notes in his autobiography:

“ . . . we both started up in alarm. I said to Freud: ‘there, that is an example of a so-called catalytic exteriorisation phenomenon [telekinesis]’

‘Oh come,’ he exclaimed. ‘That is sheer bosh.”

‘It is not,” I replied. “You are mistaken, Herr Professor. And to prove my point I now predict that in a moment there will be another loud report!’

Sure enough, no sooner had I said the words than the same detonation went off in the bookcase..

Freud only stared aghast at me. I do not know what was in his mind, or what his look meant. In any case, this incident arounds his mistrust of me, and I had the feeling that I had done something against him.”

— (MDR*, 179)

The seed of this mistrust would grow well beyond the split between Jung and Freud and would come to define the difference between Freudian and Jungian traditions that still exists to this very day. Sadly, both schools are far too often reduced to caricatures of themselves, with Jungians portrayed as being wildly woolly New-Agers and Freudians as dogmatically obsessed with sex. Neither of these summations are true.

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Jung after Freud: The confrontation with the unconscious

In his early years Jung contributed a great deal to conventional psychology and psychiatry. He helped develop and perfect the word association test, contributed to the emergence of schizophrenia as a diagnostic condition, created the theory of psychological types and advanced the theory of complexes. But it is indeed after his break with Freud that things get interesting. The trauma of that break sent Jung into a mental breakdown that he later came to understand as a “confrontation with my unconscious” — an event that broke Jung wide open to concepts well beyond the confines of conventional psychology. He wrote in his autobiography:

“The years when I was pursuing my inner images were the most important of my life — in them everything essential was decided. It all began then; the later details are only supplements and clarifications of the material that burst forth from the unconscious and that first swamped me. It was the prima material for a lifetime’s work.” — (MDR, 225).

This productive period produced ideas like the collective unconscious and the archetypes. These concepts enabled Jung to push well beyond the limits of the personal unconscious, the domain of classical psychoanalysis, and develop his own unique path called Analytical Psychology though still better known simply as Jungian Psychology. What people are less familiar with is how Jung’s curiosity took him around the world, through reading and travel, with the aim of uncovering and incorporating wisdom missed or ignored by the West. Jung went to North and East Africa, the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico, and traveled extensively in India (where he almost met the famed guru Ramana Maharshi). In each location he met with local people to try and understand their beliefs and symbols.

Check out my recent article A new personality type - ‘Otrovert’ - is here to make life even more confusing in GQ Magazine about how Jung’s concepts of personality types like introversion and extraversion are often misused today.

While Jung’s approach no doubt conveys the superior Eurocentric tone of his time — his open mindedness to non-Western ideas and their application to human psychology was unusual. Jung was keen to seek what was universal about the human psyche and searched around the world to find common symbols in various ritual practices, religions, rituals, narratives, and myths. At the same time, he was wary of what we would today understand as cultural appropriation — warning that ideas from elsewhere cannot be wholesale applied to Western experience. Though his interest was in the universal, he acknowledged the importance of local, trans-generational histories, and that cultural symbols and narratives are deeply contextual.

Not finding his answers in Western Psychology, Jung looks East:

Around the time that Jung was developing his own post-Freudian path, texts and ideas from the East became more available in the West through newly translated ancient texts. It was clear to Jung early on that these texts were potential treasure troves that resonated with his own thought. It might surprise you to learn that he not only engaged personally with these texts, but that he wrote commentaries in the early German translations of the I-Ching and the Secret of the Golden Flower — later translated in to English as well.

The I-Ching:

In his forward to the I-Ching, Jung notes that it is “important to cast off the prejudices of the Western mind” (xxii) by relinquishing a purely scientific point of view and taking another approach. While this is exactly the kind of open-mindedness that freaked out Freud, Jung still wasn’t altogether comfortable embracing what was likely to be perceived by his peers as kooky foreign mysticism. In the introduction to the I-Ching he admits:

“I had not been feeling too happy in the course of writing this foreword, for, as a person with a sense of responsibility towards science, I am not in the habit of asserting something I cannot prove or at least present as acceptable to reason . . . I have undertaken it because I myself think that there is more to the ancient Chinese way of thinking than meets the eye” (I-Ching, xxxiii).

Whether this is a rhetorical device or not, we cannot be sure. His work around concepts like synchronicity and alchemy were already rather unscientific and mostly dismissed by the establishment. So in many ways, reaching out towards the wildly unconventional falls pretty firmly in Jung’s wheelhouse. Jung was also already comfortable operating in undiscovered terrain. In the developing field of psychotherapy, Jung notes:

“we become more accustomed to adopting methods that work even though for a long time we may not know why … In the exploration of the unconscious we come upon very strange things, from which a rationalist turns away with horror, claiming afterwards that he did not see anything. The irrational fullness of life has taught me never to discard anything, even when it goes against all our theories or otherwise admits of no immediate explanation” (I-Ching, xxxiv).

In this quote, we see Jung sounding very much like Freud, though the “strange things” each is referring to is quite different.

Jung notes that engagement with the I-Ching is reliant upon a commitment to self-knowledge, and that the divination tool is wasted without it. In this sense self-knowledge goes deeper than the usual one associated with classical psychoanalysis, because it’s really knowledge that goes beyond the self alone and into the realms of something larger and more universal — realms covered in the philosophies of Taoism, Buddhism, and Advaita Vedanta more so than Western psychology. Jung’s ideas around archetypes and the collective unconscious may be very different from these Eastern concepts — but they afforded him an opportunity to deepen and develop his fledgling ideas on the one hand, and frame them for Westerners on the other.

The Secret of the Golden Flower:

Even more inscrutable than the I-Ching is The Secret of the Golden Flower, an ancient Taoist text otherwise known as the Chinese Book of Life. Jung wrote a commentary to it when it was first translated into German by Richard Wilhelm. The Golden Flower ignited Jung’s own interest around personal transformation, a concept that he was exploring in his study of alchemy and the development of his theory of individuation. Jung finds the Chinese Taoist perspective quite mind-blowing, yet renews his warning to enthusiastic Westerners not to mistakenly throw off their Western worldview too quickly and find themselves “pitiably imitating” the East rather than truly integrating its wisdom.

Jung goes on to explain that he developed Analytical Psychology in complete ignorance of the Chinese philosophy contained in these texts. However, he has come to understand that unconsciously at least, he had all along been moving in that direction the whole time. Jung relates this to his development of the idea of the collective unconscious.

“A higher and wider consciousness which only comes by means of assimilating the unfamiliar, tends toward autonomy, toward revolution against the old gods who are nothing other than those powerful, unconscious, primordial images which, up to this time, have held consciousness in thrall.” (Secret of the Golden Flower, 84).

Through the lens of modern psychology, Jung continues his commentary by describing concepts from the text that, though familiar to many readers today, would have been quite alien to Western readers in the 1930s. Among these are “Tao” or “the way”, “chi” energy, and the concept of “oneness” or “unity” which is represented in the golden flower, which Jung relates to his own work with mandalas. To this he integrates elements from Western philosophy and spirituality: concepts like logos, eros, and Western conceptualisations of the soul, alongside his own concepts of the collective unconscious, archetypes, and the contrary forces of anima and animus.

All of this conceptual integration is gathered towards the therapeutic goal to free the individual from the domination of the unconscious. Just as it was for Freud, this liberation is accomplished through increased self-knowledge that is gained in the analytic process. Unlike Freud, however, Jung understands the nature of the unconscious very differently.

When Freud coined that now famous maxim, “Where id was, ego shall be,” he was referring specifically to the personal unconscious or “the repressed” which should be brought into consciousness. Jung does not dismiss personal unconscious, rather, he incorporates it into the much larger concept of collective unconsciousness — an aspect of the unconscious, populated by universal archetypes, shared with the whole of human kind, alive and dead.

While ideas from Eastern Spirituality, Philosophy, and Mysticism do not map directly onto Jung’s ideas, they do resonate more closely with them than many concepts from Western Psychology. This is most notable in Jung’s conception of the numinous, the archetypes, and synchronicity, all of which elude “scientific” understanding.

Jung’s unique integration of Eastern philosophy and Western psychology is no easy fit:

The aim of Jung’s commentaries are to build a bridge between the paradigms of Western Psychology and Eastern Philosophy. While that bridge is a surely a clunky one, we must remember that in his time, Jung was a cutting-edge pioneer at this meeting of worldviews. He repeatedly states that one paradigm should not be dispensed of for another, but rather integrated into a whole. As complementarity is so central to his work, he argues for it here too: like yin and yang, the philosophies developed by East and West are missing important insights that can be gained from one another — a great opportunity for synthesis.

Importantly, Jung points to the universally shared experience of suffering — an experience that drives people to both psychotherapy and spiritual guidance (famously one of the four noble truths of Buddhism). Jung notes that it’s suffering that drives all cultures to seek something beyond themselves:

“it is the tremendous experiment of becoming conscious, which nature has imposed on mankind, uniting the most diverse cultures in a common task [to overcome suffering]” — (Golden Flower, 136).

Freud was a master at creating a thoroughly Western paradigm through which to comprehend the personal unconscious — a paradigm that in its admittedly flawed nature focuses on analysis: an over-emphasis on thinking. What initially attracted Jung to Freud, however, was sheer scope and creativity of his seminal work The Interpretation of Dreams, a book which illuminated the deeply symbolic creativity of the unconscious mind.

Jung’s journey from Freud’s paradigm of the personal unconscious toward developing his own theory of the collective unconscious began through the doors that were open to him at the time — Christian theology, Greek and Roman mythology, and medieval alchemy. The arrival of newly translated texts from the East created a whole new opportunity that human experience in a novel way for Western eyes.

While there’s a long distance between Jung’s interest in the seances of his early years and Eastern Philosophy later, what unites them is his capacity to withhold critical judgement and embrace the unknown and lesser understood. Whereas Freud shed a brilliant light on the lesser-known parts of our personal psyches, Jung went beyond that to inquire about the transpersonal and collective. His seeking was always there but was re-ignited by his confrontation with the unconscious, an event, possibly psychotic, that he submitted himself to fully to better understand himself and the human psyche at large. In his courage to pursue this, and write about it, he opened up an even wider door to what lies beyond the known in all of us.

So what are your thoughts? Should Western psychology be open to insights from the East, or should it keep to its own lane? Please let me know in the comments. If you enjoy exploring the hidden histories of psychology, subscribe to Applied Psychodynamics for new posts every week.

This is a fully revised and updated version of an Medium article that has now been deleted.

Aaron Balick, PhD, is a psychotherapist, author, and GQ psyche writer exploring the crossroads of depth psychology, culture, and technology.

No matter how old you get, there’s a part of you that never quite believes it. Most of us carry an “inner age” that stubbornly refuses to budge — usually somewhere around 25. I first noticed the gap in 2001, when I was 28 years old and starting my very first job as a student therapist in a large London sixth-form college. In nervous anticipation of seeing my first ever student I had read and re-read his file, forming a clear picture of him in my mind’s eye.

At the allotted hour he knocked on the door and I invited him in. Instead of the boy I had imagined, there stood a young man, perhaps six inches taller than I, complete with a moustache. Caught somewhat off guard I picked up his file to confirm his name - it was indeed him.

“But it says here,” I said, frantically pointing at his file, “that you were born in 1985?”

“That’s right, I’m 16,” he said, then rather archly, “It’s just as well you’re the counsellor, sir, and not the maths teacher.”

It hadn’t occurred to me to do the maths because it was inconceivable to me that 1985 was sufficiently long ago to produce a fully grown teenager. In a flash I came to realise that the music that defined my teens were for him, already oldies; the mix tapes we made, already antiques; and me, already “sir”. While I saw myself as a jumped-up graduate, he saw me as one of them – a fully-fledged grown up. I was not ready.

Varieties of experiences like these multiply as time marches forward. Mine included the moment I realised I was older than the new Superman (2006) ; the uncomprehending silence I got after dropping a Buffy the Vampire Slayer reference in a lecture to a room full of first-year university students; and the first time I went to see a doctor who was younger than I. We experience these nudges and reminders as uncanny because even though we know we’re getting older, there’s a big part of us that feels like we stopped aging somewhere along the way.

Leonardo DiCaprio is as surprised as you are that he doesn’t look like he’s just stepped off the deck of the Titanic.

That Leonardo DiCaprio recently disclosed that he feels 32 despite being 50 should come as a surprise to absolutely no one. If you’re honest with yourself, you’ve been weirded out ever since you noticed he no longer looked like he just stepped off the d Titanic. For some strange reason it seems odder that celebrities age rather than stay the same.

When we get to know a public figure in their prime, we continue to identify with them as they once were. As we watch them age, they seem to peel away from the essence of the version of them we’ve internalised. Watching celebrities age throws up a mirror to ourselves too, one in which we also see a gap between how old we feel and how old we actually are.

You will spend most of your life feeling out of alignment with your actual age

Up until our mid-twenties we tend to imagine ourselves as a little bit older than we are, and from our thirties we do the reverse. It’s only at around the quarter-life mark when we enter that sweet spot of synchrony where our chronological and perceptual age fleetingly inhabit the same time zone. Soon after, they part company again, and this time for good.

It seems kind of crazy that your actual and subjective age are in sync for such a brief period; that we spend most of our lives in asynchronous delusion feels like a cruel joke. So what is it about that quarter-life moment that pulls so strongly on our self-perception? There are numerous biological, evolutionary, and cultural reasons why this is so, but the deeply personal experience of it is naturally driven by psychology.

Forever 25: Why you feel younger than you are

Once comfortably in to adulthood, why do people feel younger than they are? In short, your mid-twenties are the culmination of the two decades plus of growing, learning, and developing that preceded them. The final step, the development of your executive functioning, the cognitive skills that help you manage impulses, actions, and emotions, comes online in your early twenties. After more than 20 years in development, this final step is what neurologically marks your debut as a fully formed adult, the person you’ll come to know and identify with for the rest of your life.

How to grow older gracefully

This internalised image of yourself represents the essence of who you are, your spirit. And just like DiCaprio, it is likely to feel truer to you despite the version in the mirror that has more wrinkles and less hair. As the years increase and the gap between subjective and actual age increases, you must resist the compulsion to fight the inevitable. It’s a necessity that “youth is wasted on the young” because being too conscious of youth during youth would be ruinous to its cause. So don’t lament its passing or regret choices untaken. Instead, try to remain connected to the vitality of its spirit while connecting to the wisdom that comes with the passage of time.

What about you? Do you feel frozen in time at a certain age? Drop it in the comments — I bet most of you will say “around 25” (I’m actually 23). And if you enjoyed this piece, subscribe and share it with someone who still thinks they’re younger than the mirror suggests.

Aaron Balick, PhD is a an international keynote speaker, psychotherapist, psyche writer for GQ, and author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking connected-up instantaneous culture and the self; Keep Your Cool: How to deal with life’s worries and stress; and The Little Book of Calm: tame your anxiety, face your fears, and live free. He is an honorary senior lecturer at the Department for Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex.

We all have stuff that we’re good at and stuff that we’re bad at. Typically we lean into what comes easier to us and avoid what’s more difficult (see my previous post on how AI makes makes this worse for personal growth and development). While this is entirely natural (Freud called it “the pleasure principle”), over time it can make us pretty lopsided.

Superior and inferior functions in Jungian psychology

While it’s deeply satisfying to work in the comfort zone of our best traits, things can go amiss if we don’t pay attention to our lesser ones too. For Carl Jung, these traits aren’t seen as “good” and “bad”, but rather the “superior” and “inferior” ways in which we prefer to function. This is an important distinction because it’s less judgemental; your inferior functions aren’t “bad” — they’re just not as well developed as your superior ones.

Even with the best will and devoted practice, because they are part of your character, your inferior traits will never become as good as your superior ones — but developing our inferior capacities pays dividends far beyond just getting better at stuff. When we lean on our superior functions we tend to feel skilled and confident, while having to engage in our inferior ones can dissolve our confidence and make us feel de-skilled. Think of it as the psychological version writing with your dominant or less dominant hand.

In Jungian psychology, the way we function is better understood as an aspect of your personality, not about specific skills like verbal or numerical proficiency (though this matters too), rather your preferred way of perceiving, understanding, and being in the world: it’s about how you organise your experience.

In short, your superior functions are those that are most developed and that you are most conscious of, while your inferior ones are less developed and, at least according to Jung, closer to the unconscious. The way we function is related to our “attitude” or “personality orientation.”

Introversion vs. extraversion: What Jung really meant:

Most readers will be familiar with the two main Jungian orientations: introversion and extraversion. These attitudes will deeply influence how each of us engage in the functions that sit underneath them. You can think of attitude or orientation as a higher category under which the functions sit.

It’s really important to keep in mind (and this is the whole point of this article!) that we are comprised of all orientations and all functions, we just tend to have preferences for some over the others. To consider yourself as “an introvert” or “an extravert” is just wrong — it’s more about a preference for each attitude, and even that is dependent on context.

You can find more snappy videos like this on my Instagram by searching for @DrAaronB.

Contrary to popular understanding, nobody is purely an introvert or an extravert, we all have elements of both. It’s also not true that extroverted people are gregarious and introverted ones are shy (though, there’s correlations). These functions are better seen on a spectrum of personality preferences that everybody has access to by a matter of degree.

A simple way to understand what your dominant preference is has to do with whether what most energises you is inside or outside your own head.

Extraverts tend to be oriented towards the outer world of events, people, and activities. They tend to get energy from, and give energy to, the world outside themselves, particularly other people.

Introverts are more inwardly oriented, getting energy from their thoughts, feelings and ideas: this is where they tend to get and give most of their energy.

How introverted and extraverted you may be in any given moment is dependent a lot on context. For example, I tend to lean introverted at parties, preferring to speak to one person at a time on a deep level instead of being a social butterfly. However, when I am teaching or speaking, I lean very extravert and love to be stimulated by a room full of people. Those familiar with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) will be familiar with the situation-dependant aspect of this.

The four psychological functions: Sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition

It’s helpful to think of superior functioning as your “super power” and inferior functioning as your “secret door.”

Sitting under the general attitude of extraversion and introversion we have a set of preferred ways of functioning in the world. Here it starts to get kind of complicated, but I’ll do my best to keep it simple. For Carl Jung there are four main functions that we all draw upon to get information about the world around us and then organise that information — the names of them can be quite misleading, so I will define them here:

Sensation: Using of the five senses to obtain information about the world around us.

Thinking: Using logical analysis and rational thought telling us what’s happening.

Feeling: Using emotions, feelings, and values to understand the world around us.

Intuition: Using patterns to draw meaning out of the world, finding the “gestalt” from the pieces.

Hopefully you can see why we need all of these ways of perceiving the world in order to function properly — too much reliance on any one of them can leave blindspots in the way your perceive the world — and the larger those blind spots become, the more you can miss. By looking at these you can probably get a pretty good idea what you’re good at and what you are less good at. Again, those who know the MBTI, which is based on Jung’s thinking, will be familiar with this.

Your superior function is your “superpower”, your inferior function is your “secret door.”

When you’re in working within your superior function, you are like a super hero. You feel like you are in flow and that you can accomplish anything. This is why you tend to lean into those superior qualities — you feel competent, secure, and good! Sometimes, however, you are forced to lean into your inferior ones, and when that happens, it has the opposite effect on you — we feel incompetent, deskilled, and out of sorts.

Check out my recent article Want to Survive the AI Revolution? Develop your inner masochist in GQ Magazine about how the dangers that AI poses by offering you easy ways to avoid developing your functions.

Superior functioning is your super power because it’s where you feel most at home, it’s where you rock. Because it is so deeply linked to how your perceive the world you inhabit, it has the power to make you feel secure and confident in your body and in your preferred context. According to Jung your superior function is “always an expression of the conscious personality, of its aims, will, and general performance.”

The Shadow: Why Jung said you should love what you’re bad at

Why you should appreciate your inferior function is less obvious; why should you love what you’re bad at and makes you feel de-skilled? Jung suggests that our inferior functions offer an opportunity for us to grow because they are “closer to the unconscious.” Contrary to feeling at home and in control like we do in superior functioning, when in inferior function we may feel out of control and even afraid. This darker less familiar part of our psyche is what Jung called “the shadow”, a central concept in what would become known as “shadow work.”

Because we’re unpracticed in the shadow, it feels alien to us when we are forced to engage with it. If we continue to avoid engaging with it across the life span, we deny ourselves access to the “secret door” of personal growth. It is by pushing through discomfort and the less familiar that the greatest opportunity for personal growth lies.

Sounds pretty scary, right? Well, it can be if it remains unrecognised and repressed, when this happens, it gets stuck in our “shadow” — and anything that gets stuck there is liable to sneak up on us and wreak havoc when it can.

Developing our inferior function isn’t only a sensible thing to do so we become more well rounded or to logically have a Plan B when we can’t draw on our superior one. Developing the inferior function helps us to gain access to our shadow; it throws light into our unconscious; and it helps us to grow more securely into our greatest potential. It also helps us to better understand and relate to those who have functions that differ from ours, thereby making us more compassionate human beings.

Functions in couples and teams: Functions that complement each other

As it happens we tend to find ways to deal with our inferior functioning quite unconsciously. For example, many of us find partners that complement our functioning, and in doing so we outsource some of that functioning to them. While this might strike some kind of balance, if both partners don’t also develop those inferior capacities it can be a recipe for disaster later. The same thing happens in the workplace. Great teams are comprised of personality types and functions that complement each other. However, they shouldn’t be altogether compartmentalised as that can damage interpersonal relations and miss opportunities for synergies.

How to love your inferior function: a self development guide

While you should definitely surround yourself with others who have different typologies from you, try and do so while developing your own inferior ones!

Here are some suggestions:

1. Self-awareness is key: Look inside, you know yourself pretty well, so you probably have a pretty good idea of what needs developing. Identify those traits you want to develop and set an intention to do so. Getting a good therapist is a good start if you want to go at it seriously.

2. Get feedback: Though you’ll have a pretty good idea yourself, the nature of inferior functions is that they tend to hide from you. So reach out to trusted others at home or at work and get a second-hand evaluation of the areas you may need to be looking at. The aim is to get this information from trusted and caring others, so it should be done with sensitivity and compassion.

3. Don’t avoid situations that require your inferior functioning: Avoidance is our favourite way of letting inferior functions languish. Subject yourself to uncomfortable experiences that will develop that function and strengthen it. Just like working out weaker muscles at the gym, you don’t want to go full throttle all at once, but start a little at a time to build in the skills.

4. Allow yourself to feel de-skilled: I’m a words-guy so I recently joined a life drawing class. This was really challenging for me and I was not happy with the results. However, it’s not about results, it’s about confronting that discomfort and opening that door to your less developed, more unconscious parts of yourself.

5. Hang with others who have skills in the areas in which you are inferior: Let them be guides to you, learn from them. Try to see the world through their eyes. Challenge yourself.

6. Play: Building your inferior capacities is challenging but it can be fun. See it as an opportunity to grow into who you really are, “individuation” which is the essence of Jungian personal development. The great irony is that while in your inferior function you may not feel yourself your are in fact growing more and more into yourself each time — expanding yourself — individuating.

This is a fully revised and updated version of an original blog post from 2023.

Aaron Balick, PhD is an international keynote speaker, psychotherapist, psyche writer for GQ, and author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking connected-up instantaneous culture and the self; Keep Your Cool: How to deal with life’s worries and stress; and The Little Book of Calm: tame your anxiety, face your fears, and live free. He is an honorary senior lecturer at the Department for Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex.

All Jung quotes came from Volume 7 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung

I’m no luddite. I’m happy as Larry that some brilliant soul invented the wheel so I don’t have to drag things around on my back all the time. I’m also very grateful for my washing machine, dishwasher, and hoover - and most of all - that as a writer and academic, I grew up in a world of Microsoft Word instead of a mechanical typewriter (the respect I have for writers of the analogue age is boundless). In short, I love how our tools have made things easier in the past, but I’m really uncomfortable with what tech has been seeking to ease in recent years.

This is a supplement to my recent GQ article Want to Survive the AI Revolution? Find your inner masochist providing extra content, resources, and suggestions for my Substack subscribers. Pleased read the original article first so you’ll know what I’m talking about!

Is technology giving us what we want at the expense of what we need?

It’s now just over a decade since I published The Psychodynamics of Social Networking (PSN). While in tech-years this may seem millennia ago, it remains relevant today because it focusses less on any particular tech platform or innovation (which change very quickly) and more on how human psychology (which doesn’t) is mediated by tech. One of the foundations of the theory that I laid out at that time how technology lowers the bar to just about everything - and in lowering that bar it allows us to skip important steps between our desires and our outcomes.

In PSN I argued that while human beings fundamentally need to give and receive authentic recognition to each other, to use the colloquial expression, “to really be seen”, social media offered us the much more superficial experience of validation instead. My go-to metaphor is that this is like needing the nutrition of a salad but getting a donut instead. Donuts are great, but you cannot live on them.

But donuts are addictive - just like getting likes, follows, and shares is. The longer we go living on donuts, the harder it is to get used to eating salads again, and we start to get sick.

Dating apps are like canapés

Dating apps were designed to take one of the big pain points out of dating - that is meeting new people - and they did a wonderful job. Too wonderful. They no doubt make it easier to meet people, but they also make it much more difficult to get to know them better. It’s much easier to graze upon a selection of canapés on them than it is to settle into enjoying a nice long meal. And while there’s no doubt that they have enabled many many people to dine with each other happily, that’s not what they are designed to do.

In solving the pain point of meeting, it created a bigger one in sustaining. Not only that, but the more you get lost in the meeting, the less you have a chance to develop the skills that are required for the sustaining, and these are the very skills we need to form happy long lasting relationships.

Why do we ghost people?

Put simply, because managing interpersonal relationships is among the hardest things that humans do (it’s also among the most gratifying). Finding that sweet spot between our similarities is terrifically difficult (just look at the state of the world), but being able to manage it correlates to all sorts of things like mental and physical health and a long life. The trouble is, all our digital platforms seek to compromise this.

Every communication that happens across a platform is stripped, to some degree, of the complexity of that communication in a live face to face situation. The more we become accustomed to these simpler communications, the less good we become at managing interpersonal complexity.

This is why ghosting happens. It is easier to ghost someone than it is to respectfully and decently tell them your not interested - it’s also a lot less humane. It’s easier to text a gripe, email a complaint, or lash out on a social network than it is to sit across someone and talk it through. But every time we make that task easier, we make it harder on ourselves to draw on those skills when we need them - and trust me, we need them.

What’s the best way to choose how to use AI?

For the record, I’m writing this post all by myself, but I may very well use AI to help me make a promotional LinkedIn post for it. After all, I’ve already done the hard work. For me, this is a good use of AI. Should I use AI to write the article itself, what is the point? Not only is there none of me in it, I also miss the opportunity to challenge myself to come up with the goods that keep me sharp.

This isn’t to deny that it’s sometimes tempting to get AI to do some of the thinking for me as well - it can be. For the moment however, when I’ve asked it to that I’m unsatisfied with the result 95% of the time anyway - I can do it better myself. But even when it gets better, and it will, I will have to resist that temptation because to do so would defeat the whole point of being a creative person contributing to the world!

In my GQ article I referenced some research that shows the cognitive cost of having AI do the heavy lifting for you when it comes to creative and intellectual work. Even partial assistance can have a significantly deteriorate learning. Further research points to “metacognitive laziness” and a reduction in critical thinking. Much of this research is new, and much more needs to be done, but I believe these are signs of a clear and present danger.

Don’t let influence outshine expertise

What is becoming very clear to me is how the dangers of AI are closely correlated to how it is used and at what level of expertise. In a previous post I discussed how I picked up an error that ChatGPT made that a novice in my field would not have picked up. I was able to make use of ChatGPT because I have the expertise to make these critical distinctions - distinctions that I am only able to make because I engaged in the hard work of becoming an expert.

The confluence of social media and AI have created a topsy turvy world where influence trumps expertise, and because of this, people are motivated more to become influencers than they are to acquire real expertise. If you have a broad reach on TikTok, you can just have AI create content for you and use you popular algorithm to propagate it. You end up being an empty vessel through which manufactured content is spread. It’s not only a very dangerous situation for society, but it’s not so good for you either. I mean, where are you anyway?

Do The Hard Work, You Won’t Regret It

A “steep learning curve” is steep because it recognises the effort required to acquire the learning. We increase our weight resistance at the gym because the continued physical challenge helps us to develop to be our best. We stick through conflict in relationships and try to work it out with couples counselling because we know that intimate relationships require work in order to thrive.

There’s no more reason to plow a field with a hoe if you can use a tractor than there is to get some AI assistance for a powerpoint presentation in area of your expertise. What I am suggesting is that you choose very carefully where you cut your corners because you will pay for it later. Here are some final take aways.

FAQ:

Q: How can AI undermine learning?

A: When AI removes the friction from challenging tasks, it short-circuits the very processes that build skill and expertise. Research shows this can reduce neural engagement, weaken critical thinking, and encourage “metacognitive laziness” — a reliance on the tool instead of one’s own capabilities.

If you want to use it for learning, make sure you don’t let it do the work for you. Instead of using it to help you write an essay, use it to quiz you, test you, and have a conversation with you about the material. Make it challenge you!

Q: When is using AI a good idea?

A: Use AI to support tasks in areas where you already have expertise and can critically evaluate its output. Avoid using it to produce content that you want to learn more about, where the struggle is essential for growth.

Q: Why is friction important for personal development?

A: Friction — whether in relationships, creative work, or learning — pushes us beyond our comfort zones, strengthening resilience, adaptability, and problem-solving. Without it, we risk stagnation and a loss of capability.

Q: What’s the difference between convenience and corner-cutting?

A: Convenience removes unnecessary barriers. Corner-cutting skips essential steps. The former makes life more efficient; the latter can erode the skills and depth that give your work and life meaning.

I used AI to assist myself in making this FAQ - which is well within my personal “fair use” policy.

Aaron Balick, PhD is a an international keynote speaker, psychotherapist, psyche writer for GQ, and author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking connected-up instantaneous culture and the self; Keep Your Cool: How to deal with life’s worries and stress; and The Little Book of Calm: tame your anxiety, face your fears, and live free. He is an honorary senior lecturer at the Department for Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex.

Trusting your gut isn’t always wise. This article explores when gut instinct is reliable, when it’s shaped by unconscious bias, and how to cultivate authentic intuition by integrating feeling, thought, and stillness.

It might seem like good advice, but trusting your gut should not be motto to uncritically live by. While intuition should no doubt have a bigger place in our decision making, gut instinct is no less immune to bias and irrationality than thinking is. Yes, intuition is real, and it’s a great pointer — but there are a few things you should know before putting all your trust in a system that can still lead you astray.

In this article will learn why you shouldn’t take your gut’s word at face value — and how you can build skills to increase your intuitive skills.

We Know Thinking Can Be Faulty

Thinking about thinking goes all the way back to Socrates - and while he valorised our cognitive capacities, he also suggested it should come with a user warning. Like modern LLM’s (AI’s large language models like ChatGPT), the confidence that comes alongside our thoughts cannot always be relied upon. This Socratic tradition has developed over time, achieving psychological sophistication in the form of modern cognitive psychology. This branch of psychology teaches that our thinking can distort objectivity by ways of concepts like these to name just a few:

Confirmation Bias: Seeking out or interpreting information in ways that confirm your preexisting beliefs

Availablity Heurisitics: Judging likelihood based on how easily examples come to mind

Negativity Bias: Paying more attention to negative than positive information

Groupthink: Conforming to group consensus to avoid conflict or isolation

Cognitive distortions like these not only direct our thinking about the world, but perhaps more importantly, direct our self-concept and behaviour. In cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) these errors of thinking are more personalised like:

Catastrophising: Imagining the worst possible out come

Dichotomous thinking: Seeing the world as black and white extremes rather than nuanced grey areas

Filtering: Taking in only information that confirms your “script” about the world (usually by taking criticism more seriously than praise).

On the surface level you can have all sorts of thoughts about particular things (e.g. “my presentation will be terrible,” “that person doesn’t like me”, “I can never do things right.) but below that, if you follow them down, you come to your core beliefs which are usually very simple statements like, “I am not good enough” or “I am unloveable.”

Core beliefs the more sophisticated narratives or conversations we have in our heads and they can affect actual outcomes in our lives. For example, if you think you are not good enough, you may not go for a job that you’re perfectly capable of getting because your irrational core belief that doesn’t accord with reality. Just because you’ve been told you’re not good at something, and just because you believed it, doesn’t make it true. It could just be your conditioning.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy aims to correct this through a variety of techniques that help retrain our thinking to get a wider more objective perspective on things. Both Cognitive Psychology and CBT come from a worldview that prioritises the role of thinking while generally diminishing the importance of emotions, the body, and intuition. But relying too much on thinking doesn’t really work. Most of us have had the experience of trying to make an important life through thinking alone - making columns of benefits and disadvantages - and finding it doesn’t quite satisfy our answer. This approach usually doesn’t work because you’re only working with one set of data - when there’s a lot more available to support your decision.

Because this problem is so universally experience people often assume that you should just leave thinking behind, appeal to your intuition and “go with your feelings.” Your feelings, however, are equally open to disinformation - it’s just disinformation of a different kind.

Are Feelings and Emotions a Reliable Source of Data?

Western culture is thinking-driven and often doesn’t take feelings into adequate consideration - if it’s not empirical, if you can’t attach a number to it, it’s easily dismissed. However, incorporating feelings into decision-making is crucial, becuse it fills in a much bigger picture than columns of pros and cons.

This is why it often happens that when looking at these columns, one might still choose the less obvious choice because it feels better, despite the logic of the situation. It’s the same thing when you flip a coin, but disagree with the answer - your feelings are telling you something different from your mid.

Just like thinking, emotions are built through conditioning too. A perfect example of this is the fear of intimacy. Oftentimes such a fear is built upon having had your trust broken before. Perhaps you have experienced abandonment from parents or carers, or people you have trusted, like lovers, who have severely let you down. This conditioning sets the scene so that that next time you feel vulnerable with someone, you are likely experience reticence, avoidance, or fear; your defences will rise, and you may walk away from the opportunity to form a perfectly loveable relationship. This isn’t thinking, it’s feeling. It’s a gut reaction, it’s most definitely real, but it’s not necessarily “correct”.

Your emotional systems are created similarly to your thinking ones. They develop over time and become habituated or programmed. Fear and anxiety are perfect examples. We learn very young to be afraid of things that may harm us like poisonous spiders or snakes - but we also learn to be afraid of things that have hurt us but aren’t essentially harmless, like rejection. It’s around these more fungible kinds of fears that we have the opportunity for personal growth through facing them.

When confronted with a venomous snake or when walking down a street alone at night in a city you don’t know, fear and caution are natural instinctual responses that arise due to your immediate environment. These are the situations in which you should absolutely trust your gut.

However, trusting your gut because you believe that for some mysterious reason it is blessed with the right answer is just as bad advice as “think it through and work out the positives and negatives. on paper” The ideal solution, in a situation where there isn’t an immediate urgency, is to find a still place inside you from which to draw on all your data — emotional, gut, bodily, intuitive, and your thinking.

How to Trust Your Gut

For the most part your natural urgency reaction systems are pretty reliable. If you are in immediate danger, your system will generally give you the tools to deal with them (fight, flight, or freeze), and you can trust that. In fact, in these cases, it’s when people override their intuition that they get in trouble (it’s we mess up more when we’re drunk!). Fortunately for most of us those situations are rare. Unfortunately, it is less rare to have a strong gut reaction, even a traumatic reaction to a non-traumatic situation — so you’re in fight/flight/freeze even when you don’t need to be — in this case it might be wiser not to trust your gut. So here are some tips about how to manage this complexity:

• If you are spinning out — it is not the time to make a decision.

Spinning out means that your thinking or feeling (or both) are in overdrive. You are feeling anxious (shallow breathing, quickened heart rate), or angry and your thinking is going a mile a minute. This means you are in reaction. You want to respond not react. So simply identify that you are spinning out and find a way to come down (take some deep breaths, meditate, walk in nature, etc.): break the cycle. Check out How Your ‘Crazy’ is the Key to Your Psychological Freedom for more on this.

• Do not identify with your thoughts or feelings. Acknowledge them, recognise them, be curious about them, then let them be.

It’s hard to get distance when you are spinning out, but you can work yourself to a still place and simply witness all those sensory and cognitive experiences as they go by. Watch them totally, non-judgementally, and trust that your unconscious is aware of and picking up all that is going on.

• Know yourself well enough to identify what thought and feeling complexes are familiar to you.

This part is tricky, but so helpful if you can do it. Can you identify when you’ve felt this way before? Sometimes the feelings and thoughts that are triggered in the here and now actually belong to your history and not the present. For example, if someone expressed irritation towards you but you experience that like an outburst from an abusive parent. The feeling you have now is a flashback of what you experienced then — but you are not currently being abused — so your response can soften. This will give you more choice and freedom to respond freshly in the present — even if that means putting off your response for a bit while you collect yourself.

• Give yourself time. Ask your unconscious to provide you with an answer — don’t try to solve it with thoughts or react with feelings.

Sleep on it. Once you’ve allowed all your thoughts and feelings to express themselves, you can choose from a non-reactive place. The choice may not always be super clear — it may just start off as a direction. By choosing from a still place, however, you are getting off the merry-go-round of conditioned reaction and developing a responsive system suited for today, not yesterday or last year.

Intuition Is a Wonderful Thing

Intuition is an intangible quality that is really the result of wisdom. All the experience you’ve had in your life gets collected in your unconscious and helps direct you in life. However, all that experience and intuition is neither value nor bias free. If you live a life expecting to be abandoned because of your past experiences, this will distort the lens of your actual experience. Then, what feels like intuition or gut instinct, is merely emotion-based programming that is not based on direct information but arises as a feeling — often a gut feeling.

However, if we can get to a place of stillness where we don’t value or judge that information but simply witness it for some time, the answer to your question or problem may coalesce into a sense of clarity. Your gut reaction to close down a relationship just as it gets going shows up to you as a defence against previous hurt rather than the right intuitive choice right now. Your gut reaction resistance to applying for a promotion reveals itself as a fear of failure (or success) and you find a more subtle intuition below that, from the now, that says “go for it!”

When you are in a situation of real danger your gut reaction and intuition are not to be ignored. Finding a place of stillness is not advised when coming upon a poisonous snake or subjected to potential danger on the streets. Keep your wits about you and react.

However, the rest of the time (which is most of the time) don’t put all your eggs into one basket. It’s no more all about what you think about something than how you feel about something. Both human data sources can be faulty. You are not your thinking (sorry Descartes was wrong on that) — nor are you your feelings — you are subject to both of them — as well as a variety of other data sources that come with your Human Being Operating System. Finding your way to a third space, a still space to rest and acknowledge and accept those experiences while being witness to them — that’s where you’ll find true intuition and then you can trust your gut.

For more on leaning into discomfort and developing an ear for your psyche, the part of you that leads on intuition, check out my latest article for GQ, What Midlife Crisis Means for Millennials.

A Little FAQ:

Q: When should I trust my gut instinct?

A: In immediate danger, gut reactions are usually reliable. But for non-urgent decisions, they may reflect emotional conditioning - so listen in, but take your time.

Q: How do I build reliable intuition?

A: By integrating thoughts, feelings, past experience, and bodily awareness — then listening with a little bit of time and distance. It takes time, an open mind, and a good deal of courage to grow your intuition over time.

Q: What’s the difference between instinct and intuition?

A: Instinct is a hardwired biological response — like pulling your hand from a hot stove. It’s fast, automatic, and shaped by evolution for survival. Intuition, on the other hand, is a more complex unconscious integration of past experiences, emotions, and subtle perceptions. Intuition is built over time, it is akin to wisdom, and at its best when you allow flexibility into your thinking, feeling, and body systems through experience, open to change, as opposed to sticking rigidly to received ideas in order to feel “safe.”

This is a version of an article I wrote some years ago for Medium that has now been deleted.

Aaron Balick, PhD is a an international keynote speaker, psychotherapist, psyche writer for GQ, and author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking connected-up instantaneous culture and the self; Keep Your Cool: How to deal with life’s worries and stress; and The Little Book of Calm: tame your anxiety, face your fears, and live free. He is an honorary senior lecturer at the Department for Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex.

One month ago I launched this Substack with its inaugural post Welcome to Applied Psychodynamics with Aaron Balick. Since then you’ve had a taste of the kinds of articles I’ve been posting:

• A depth psychology perspective on AI: What ChatGPT’s Freudian Slip Says About its Real Intentions.

• Some interesting facts about Sigmund Freud: When Freud Was Asked to Name Ten Good Books He Simply Couldn’t Resist Interpreting the Question.

• A bit of personal development: How Your ‘Crazy’ is the Key to Your Psychological Freedom

• And an expansion of my GQ article with loads of extras: The Midlife Crisis Guide for Millennials.

Now I’d love to hear from you what you want to hear more of from me?

And one more thing!

Thank you!

Aaron

You can almost always spot a midlife crisis by its symptom rather than its cause. When you imagine the archetypal middle aged man rocking up in his new red sports car, you’re not seeing his crisis so much as his attempted solution. It’s only when the initial rush of elation fades and his familiar dissatisfaction returns that he reluctantly turns up for therapy. There he finds that his solution failed because he didn’t address the underlying cause of the discontent he was trying to quell. His shiny new drive wasn't a cure, it was just the latest and most glaring symptom of his crisis of meaning.

This is a supplement to my recent GQ article What a Midlife Crisis Means for Millennials providing extra content, resources, and suggestions for my Substack subcribers. Pleased read the original article first so you’ll know what I’m talking about!

Not Your Father’s Midlife Crisis

The new car archetype has done a lot of heavy lifting over the years - yet despite it no longer really being fit for purpose, we can still learn from it. It is emblematic of the way we seek familiar solutions to novel problems. Though the cause of Mr. Boomer’s malaise was a lack of meaning in his life, he tried to resolve it with the purchase of a car, a symbol of success and achievement. In short he came to an ego-answer for a psyche problem - only the psyche seeks meaning, not new toys. As I stated in the original article, in doing this he was trying to solve a second-half-of-life problem with a first-half-of-life solution.

“We cannot live in the afternoon of life according to the progam of life’s morning ... what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.” - C. G. Jung

The psychological manifestation of the traditional midlife crisis is provoked by an existential situation; the pressure of time that arises as we make a transition from the youthful feeling that the time ahead of us is infinite, to the dawning realisation that it is in fact limited.

The midlife crisis comes at the crunch-point where the existential and psychological meet. As we grow and experience life, and as we see our time left shrinking, we come to realise that it’s time for a re-orientation of our very selves. The things that were important to us when we were younger have changed, and we are compelled to find a new direction. The real kicker is that because we’ve created our entire lives up to this point based on those earlier values - we can feel trapped by the very things that we first longed for.

It’s like a massive cosmic joke. Once you’ve achieved what your ego set out for you, your psyche comes along and changes the rules!

These days we’re more likely to regularly re-evaluate our relationship with ourselves along the way rather than facing a big reckoning like our parents’ generation might have. A bit more educated about the importance and possibility of a meaningful life, we’re less likely to be willing to sit around and wait for it to happen at some time in the future. While the one-big-event wakeup call still happens, it’s more likely that you’ll have smaller but no less important calls to action a various points in your life. However and whenever it happens, the same basic elements are at play:

• A sense of dissatisfaction with your life situation arises and continues to get worse.

• It presents itself as depression, anxiety, listlessness, restlessness, and a sense of feeling trapped or stuck.

• You often try to manage its symptoms through distraction, overwork, self-medication, or seeking temporary pleasures. All eventually fail.

• It cannot be fixed with solutions that worked in your past, but only through a deep reckoning with your Self and responding from who you’ve become, not who you once were.

The baby boomer model of hitting a crisis between the first and second half of life is reductive, though remains illustrative in its simplicity. According to Jungian analyst James Hollis, the first half of life takes place predominantly in the social world, framed by the question, “‘How can I enter this world, separate from my parents, create relationships, career, social identity?’ In the second half of life the questions change, ‘What does the soul ask of me?’ ‘What does it mean that I am here?” ‘Who am I apart from my roles, apart from my history?’ These questions necessarily raise a different agenda, and oblige us to ask questions of meaning.”

Though life doesn’t come in in two neat little halves, there is still a lot of truth in the map Hollis draws for us here. There’s also an important point that we often wish to ignore. While it’s not rigidly structured, developmental tasks do come in a general sort of order, and there are consequences for trying to skip ahead to one phase without having “completed” the preceding ones. If you try, it will almost certainly come back to bite you. After all, how could you possibly make a re-adjustment of values when you’ve yet to consolidate a set of values in the first place?

Now before you younger whipper snappers get all het up on me - I’m not saying that your values don’t matter, or that you’re not committed to them. But I am saying that values do change over time, and they change as a result of life experience. The problem with the archetypal Boomer is that they may not have been so alert to how they were changing over time, so it caught up with them all at once. The problem with younger generations may be that in their impatient longing for a sense of alignment, they may be too quick to dismiss, avoid, or foreshorten the misalignments that naturally occur in life.

Don’t Distract Yourself From Your Discontent

Nobody likes to feel unhappy, but feelings of frustration, listlessness, restlessness, and even anxiety can be messages from your unconscious that need to be listened to (naturally this is not always the case). It might sound kind of masochistic, but the psyche often communicates through discomfort. It introduces frictions into your life to make you aware of what needs to change. Because it’s unpleasant, we tend to want to escape it rather than really listen in to what the friction is telling us. The thing is, most of us want to avoid or distract ourselves from the unpleasantness rather than listen to what it’s trying to say.

As any casual viewer of Mad Men will be know, feelings of existential dread and meaninglessness in the Boomer generation were widely managed through the consumption of copious amounts of alcohol. Meanwhile, family doctors handed out barbiturates, narcotics, and amphetamines as freely as cough drops; making them amongst the most highly prescribed drugs of their day.

These days we may no longer be able to drink and smoke at work (boo) nor hit up our GPs for narcotics (double boo!), we still have myriad other ways to the difficult but important task of being accountable to our greater life’s purpose. And though self-medication is still a popular choice (and we have a new generation of uppers and downers), the more universal modus operandi is distraction - usually via social media or the compulsive consumption of diverting streaming services. While it’s find to veg out and take the edge off every once in a while, doing so too much can make us less able to hear psyche’s call and find ourselves cruising towards some kind of crisis.

After all, if psyche doesn’t get your attention by whispering, she will start to shout.

It’s a Myth that Fulfilment Only Comes with Freedom

One of the things I didn’t get enough room to explore in the original article is the tension that lies between freedom and and limitation. Part of the reason why Boomers suffered the way they did is that the rigid social structures of the time inhibited their freedom. Whether this was heteronormative expectations of the family or committing to a career for life, options were limited to start with and got more difficult to change as you went along. Notwithstanding the usual objective challenges of the economic environment, people coming of age today probably have more flexibility in social and working life than ever before. Yet this doesn’t seem to have solved the problem.

That’s because meaning and fulfilment emerge from the tension between freedom and obligation. You actually need both for personal growth and a sense of purpose. Too much obligation can crush you, but too much freedom can leave you feeling empty. Words like “resilience” and “discipline” get a bad wrap these days, but they are important factors in the course of personal development. Being able to power through periods where things feel misaligned, say in your relationship or your work, help you develop the skills required to better deploy your purpose in those periods where you are more aligned.

When you get too much freedom without having developed enough discipline, you can end up like a windsurfer who doesn't have the requisite skills to harness the wind; you end up flailing around rather than charging ahead in your intended direction. The challenges, boundaries, and limitations of the first half of life are designed not just to stifle you, but to help you develop discipline and resilience.

While the dream of total freedom would appear to ward off any potential crisis down the line, you’ll find that the opposite is true. That’s because meaning is not found in freedom alone, but rather in the tension that arises between freedom and responsibility. Nothing better illustrates this than becoming a parent. Many new parents, overwhelmed by what parenting requires, would not describe having children as fun. In fact, lots of research shows that parenthood brings a decrease in happiness, but overall increase in fulfilment - a distinction that ‘s important to understand.

Don’t Confuse Happiness With Fulfilment

Happiness is something that comes and goes, not a consistent state. Fulfilment is different. Happiness is like an ice cream cone that is to be enjoyed while it lasts. But even if it could last forever, your enjoyment wouldn’t because the happiness you experience is fundamentally based in its transience. Fulfilment or flourishing is not so much a passing experience as an underlying state of affairs.

The paradox about fulfilment is that it requires pain.

You don’t get the satisfaction of completing a marathon without the hard work of training and running it; you can’t celebrate your book launch without the hours of hard graft writing your book; and you can’t celebrate thirty years of happy marriage without all the hard work it took over the years to maintain that marriage (they should call it “fulfilling” marriage) Hard work may not be fun, but feelings of accomplishment only arise as a result of it.

Unfortunately the cultural messages we consume over social media don’t address the the complex realities of fulfilment. Instead you are sold empty promises that you can “be yourself!”, “live your best life!”, and “follow your passion” without acknowledging that rough times aren’t only par for the course, but absolutely required to develop a meaningful life. Worse, they promote the toxic expectation that if life doesn’t quite feel like “your best life” there must be something wrong.

“Anxiety is the price of the ticket to life” - James Hollis

A meaningful life is not found in the freedom to express yourself as you like alone, but rather in the tension that arises between that freedom and the responsibilities that life demands from you. You can’t “live your best life” without finding out who you really are first - and that’s not easy.

The Key to Finding Meaning Throughout the Life Course

My original GQ article was inspired by a quote from Viktor Frankl that I have reflected upon a great deal in my life:

“It wasn’t what we expected from life, but what life expected from us.”

There is so much wisdom in this quote. For me it's strength is the way it inverts the way we think about the world by encouraging us to find meaning in life as it is instead of how we want it to be. Fortunately most of us won’t encounter anything near what Frankl had to. Yet when things go awry (as they always will), we still have the cheek to shake our fists at life and scream, “why won’t you give me what I want?”. The more humble question to ask is, “what does life expect from me at this moment?”

Looking at life this way frees you from constantly seeking a better situation in exchange for responding fully to the situation you are in. It enables us to realise that we can be “living our best lives” now, not because it feels good or everything has slotted into place, but because it’s better to live fully in the live we are currently living instead of waiting for a better one to come. This isn’t settling for something less, it actually enables us to better move towards a better one to come.

“When the ego gets conscious enough and strong enough, or battered enough, it will be begin to say: “What new thing do I have to learn about myself in the world?” “Since I can no longer manage all this perplexity by my former understanding, what does the soul ask me to do in the face of this overthrow?” - James Hollis

A life is the whole picture, not just the bits that feel good. The better we become at accepting the valleys with the peaks the more fulfilling the whole ride will be. In my Little Book of Calm I use the analogy of life being like an assault course (or, for my American audience, an obstacle course).

When you sign up for one you do so expecting the challenges of climbing walls, swinging on ropes, and crawling through mud. You don’t go on an assault course, arrive at the first obstacle, and say to yourself with frustration and consternation, “what’s that doing there?” Similarly, if you’re running hurdles you don’t come to the first hurdle and say “if that hurdle weren’t here I’d be able to run forward without impediment!” It’s the same with life. Our hurdles and challenges aren’t “in the way” they are the very constituent of the life course. The sooner you get on board with that, the better.

“Fear governs so much of our lives, and produces all sorts of defence strategies. Standing up to our fear is perhaps the most critical decision necessary in the governance of life and the recovery of the soul’s agenda in the second half of life.” - James Hollis

Feelings of dread and meaninglessness in life are like whispers from a benevolent demon nudging you to take the necessary steps to address what’s lacking in your current life path. This demon only creates a crisis when its whispers are so persistently ignored that he resorts to shouting. You just have to listen out for them, and ask the right questions.

Resources:

Podcasts:

You 2.0: What Is Your Life For? Hidden Brain Podcast with Shankar Vedantam interviewing Victor Strecher.

Who Do You Want To Be? Hidden Brain Podcast with Shankar Vedantam interviewing Ken Sheldon.

Books:

Life On Purpose: How Living for What Matters Most Changes Everything by Victor Strecher.

Living an Examined Life: Wisdom for the Second Half of the Journey by James Hollis.

The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Mid-Life by James Hollis.

Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up by James Hollis.

The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life by David Brooks.

Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Research:

Sense of Purpose and Strategies for Coping With Anxiety Across Adulthood, by Gabrielle N. Pfund, Victor Strecher, Ethan Kross, and Patrick L. Hill, GeroPsych: The Journal of Gerontopsychology and Geriatric Psychiatry, 2024.

Reduced Epigenetic Age in Older Adults With High Sense of Purpose in Life, by Eric S. Kim, Julia S. Nakamura, Victor J. Strecher, and Steven W. Cole, The Journals of Gerontology: Series A, 2023.

Self-Affirmation Alters the Brain’s Response to Health Messages and Subsequent Behavior Change, by Emily B. Falk et al., PNAS, 2015.

Purpose in Life and Use of Preventive Health Care Services, by Eric S. Kim, Victor J. Strecher, and Carol D. Ryff, PNAS, 2014.

Everybody has their own kind of crazy, and each one of us is likely to be intimately familiar with their own. I use the term “crazy” and “crazies” with affection. We should treat our crazies, paradoxically enough, with respect, care, and compassion. After all, it’s there for a reason - it’s probably just outlived its usefulness.

Everyone’s craziness comes is activated by a particular trigger, and triggers differ enormously from person to person. For example, one person might go nuts with anxiety if they have the smallest inkling that they’ve embarrassed themselves in mixed company; something that somebody else would simply laugh off. Meanwhile, that very same person who laughed it off might get into pits of despair for having missed a small detail at work; something the easily embarrassed person would just apologise for and move on.

Each of us comes by our crazy in a variety of ways: I call my personal set ‘my crazies’. Your particular crazy will be a mixture of your character (call it your DNA) and upbringing. Sometimes they can be brought on by particular experiences in life. For example if when young a member of your family died of an illness, your crazy might manifest itself though irrational fears about your health, what we call hypochondria or simply health anxiety. Or if you had a parent who would freak out every time you got something wrong, you might be hypersensitive to criticism. It’s not always that direct, but we can usually find a reason for our crazies somewhere.

The great news is that once we identify our crazies as something that happens to us for a reason and not because of who we are, we’re already well on the way of resolving them. Let’s start by having a look at what sorts of crazies there are. They include things like:

• Attacking yourself relentlessly with negative self-talk.

• Finding yourself incredibly anxious about something you said or did.

• Ruminating intensely about something you think you got wrong, like replaying a difficult conversation over and over again.

• Feeling overly guilty or punishing yourself relentlessly.

• Getting overly worked up about something that’s coming up because you think it’s going to go terrible wrong.

• Getting physically unwell when you are stressed out.

These are just a few examples, but there are tons more. Each of these crazies can be a result of some of the following triggers:

• You messed something up at work, with friends, family, or a romantic partner.

• Someone messed something up with you.

• You did something you wish you hadn’t.

• Someone gave you some “constructive” criticism.

• Someone was nasty to you on social media.

• Something very important is coming up and you’re freaking out because “everything is riding on it.”

If you are experiencing one of your crazies, you can generally follow it back to your trigger. When you find that trigger, you’ll notice that it will have all the elements that have given you the crazies on previous occasions. Usually when this happens you are taking your crazy as the most serious thing in the world: it’s all you can think about, making you truly miserable. The thing is it’s your crazy that’s making you miserable not the trigger that caused it. So long as your unaware that it’s the same kinds of triggers that cause your crazy, they are like trap doors you fall into. The more you become aware of them, the less surprising they become; once you know the link between your triggers and your crazies, you strip them of their power.

Don’t Let Your Crazies Limit You.

Many of us live our lives from crazy to crazy — and even worse, we may try to avoid things that that might trigger us, just so we don’t have to experience these awful feeling they provoke. But avoiding triggers means avoiding life itself. That can get in the way of progressing in your work, friendships, and your love life.

Wouldn’t it be better if once you’re triggered you could identify that you are responding from one of your crazies and walk it back to a happier place?

I work with this stuff everyday as a psychotherapist, but that doesn’t mean I’m immune to my own crazies. I’m full of them — but I have (mostly) learned to deal with them. In fact, it was from a time that I was in a really deep crazy that I learned how to get out of it.

My Crazies Story

One day I found myself on the second story of a double decker bus completely freaking out about something I said to someone that I admired. I was replaying the event over and over again in my head and suffering terrible anxiety and regret. My breathing was shallow, my heart was beating fast, and I was furiously thinking and re-thinking what had happened. Then I suddenly had a thought:

I know this feeling — this is a feeling I’ve had before.

This was followed by a mind-blowing insight. I realised that the elements that led me to feel this way were always the same. They included speaking to someone with authority whom I admired and wanted to make a good impression in front of — and getting it sorely wrong.

I said to myself, “Of course you feel like this — this is just the sort of thing that makes you anxious.” Once I realised this was a particular vulnerability of mine (related to a personal history which is TMI for here) I worked out that I was taking it more personally than I needed to. I realised that what I was experiencing was what Jung called a “complex” - that is a semi-autonomous constellation of thoughts and emotions from early in life. When we experience a complex we’re experiencing strong feelings that belong in the past, not the present.

"A complex is a cluster of energy in the unconscious, charged by historic events, reinforced through repetition, embodying a fragment of our personality, and generating a programmed response and an implicit set of expectations."

- C.G. Jung

The most pernicious thing about a complex is not the complex itself, but when you identify with it. Instead of seeing it as a set of thoughts and feelings your are experiencing due to a trigger that threw you into a crazy, you believe it is about you in real time. While that thing that triggered your complex may indeed be real and unsettling, it’s almost never so bad as we imagine it when we’re in a complex. The trick is to be able to step out of the complex and see it for what it is.

In my case, I was able to see that all the conditions were perfect for my freak out in that moment. That brought be great relief because I was able to step aside from my complex (instead of identifying with it) and realise that back in the real world, if there were a way to resolve it I’d try and do that, and if not, well, that sucks, but it’s not the end of the world - and certainly not worthy of the freak out I was giving it. Once I’d made sense of it that way, my anxiety virtually disappeared. I still wasn’t happy about what had happened, there was nothing essentially terrible about it either: I simply didn’t have to suffer like I had been.

Next Time Your Crazies Take You Over, Recognise Them For What They Are:

Your crazies are familiar to you because that’s where you go when you’re triggered in that particular way. Triggers happen so quickly that it’s almost impossible to identify them straight away because they’ll have already sent you directly into the eye of the storm. If you’re ever lucky enough to become a Zen master you can meet your triggers with equanimity all the time— but if your like me and the rest of us, you generally have to get started after you’ve been triggered and you’re well inside your crazies.

Crazies announce themselves because they always feel the same way when you’re in them, and that’s the ticket out. Next time you experience your crazies, the first thing you need to do is simply acknowledge that your in a crazy (or more technically, you’re identified with your complex). “This is it,” you’ll tell yourself, “these are my crazies.” The main cue is that you’re freaking out in your usual familiar way: if it feels like your crazy, you know it’s not so much about what happened, but about how it triggered you.

Don’t miss my latest article for GQ: What a ‘midlife crisis’ means for Millennials

Once you’ve made that realisation you’re halfway there — just take some deep breaths and start to slowly walk it back. The thoughts and feelings associated with your complex will still be there, but you’ll be better able to observe it rather than be in the centre of it. Once you’re a bit calmer, you can start to ask yourself what the trigger was. It’s likely to be just the sort of thing that sends you to your crazies — and you can use that knowledge to strip away its power.

Your thinking will be something like, “Of course I’m freaking out, that sort of thing always freaks me out.” Whatever you need to do (or not) about the thing that triggered you can be decided later, the main thing to do now is step out of your crazies as soon as you can. Give yourself a nice pat on the back for using your crazy to learn something about yourself. You’re now on your way to controlling your crazies, instead of them controlling you.

It Takes Time To Overcome Your Crazies, But Awareness Of Your Complexes Usually Brings Immediate Improvement:

This sort of thing doesn’t happen overnight. Even the story I shared with you above only happened after I’d fallen down that trap door enough times that this time I finally woke up to it. And even now they still get to me, but I’m much better at knowing what to do with them when they do.

When we’re in our crazies it feels like the most important thing in the world, but 99% of the time, it’s just not. Don’t believe me? All you have to do is check.

• How many times have you freaked out about something for ages that you said or did only to find that nobody really noticed, or if they did, it wasn’t nearly so bad as you thought?

• How many times have you wasted hours on crazies only to find out later you were worried about nothing?

• How many times were you freaking out about something that felt like it was going to ruin everything at the time, but you can hardly remember what it was now?

Sure, actual bad things do happen, but we find that when they do, we generally have the resources to deal with them without getting crazy. Furthermore, when your in a complex you’re terrible at being objective about the situation, so the crazies don’t actually help anyway. You’re much better at addressing any given situation from outside your crazy.

Getting control of your crazies takes time. But each time you identify one, step back, find the trigger, and understand it, you gain a foothold into greater emotional freedom.

Even just being able to say to yourself, “Oh, I’m in one of my crazies right now” gives you enough distance from it to make a big difference.

With practice you’ll learn that these events trigger an emotional experience and no more than that — so learn to deal with the emotional experiences. Over time triggers have less power because you’ve become conscious their little game. Sure, you’ll still succumb to your crazies sometimes even after you’re aware of them, but once you know their game too they will be less severe and happen less often.

It’s as Simple as Not Taking the Invitation.

Imagine your trigger as if it were an invitation to freak out. Ideally, you just don’t accept the invitation. In the real world, however, we generally find that we’ve accepted it without realising it: we’re already mid-crazy. But it’s realising when you are mid-crazy that is the key. It might be a bit late, but now is the time to send back that invitation. No doubt it’s hard to send back in mid-crazy, but it can be done. With practice you can send it back sooner and sooner, getting less and less crazy.

In the name of total transparency, it can be difficult to do this on your own. I believe I was able to do what I did on the bus as a result of many years of therapy that gave me the insight I needed to identify my crazies. By all means do try and do it on your own, but if you have the opportunity, doing it with a trained professional helps a lot. It' usually takes the eyes of another person in a therapeutic relationship not only to deal with the crazies as they arise, but to help you heal from the situations that gave you the crazies in the first place.

All Crazies Are Not Equal:

I’m writing here about the everyday crazies that disrupt our lives and make us all miserable and unhappy — not the sorts of mental disorders that profoundly inhibit and disrupt a life. I’ve been using the word “crazy” on purpose to deconstruct and have a bit of fun with it. Every single human being has crazies and it helps to see “crazy” as something on a spectrum, rather than something someone has or doesn’t have.

That being said, experiences at the more severe end of the spectrum will need more specialist help than you can give yourself by reading an article (however wonderful) like this. The same goes for triggers. A trigger can be any event that sends us into an uncomfortable psychological state — but being triggered into a traumatised state is a different thing altogether. So if you find yourself suffering in a way that you can’t handle on your own or put yourself in any kind of danger, do seek professional help.

This is a version of an article I wrote some years ago for Medium that has now been deleted.

I’ve been reading Ernest Jones’ three volume biography of Freud - which is actually a lot more interesting that you might first suppose. It’s full of wonderful personal anecdotes which personalise the man everybody in the 21st century thinks they know about but don’t. Whatever issues you have with Freud’s theories, in reading him you simply have to respect his mind. He asks questions that no one else asks, and pursues avenues no one even thought to look.

In Volume Three Jones shares one of these stories which really illustrates the way Freud thinks. In 1907 Viennese publisher Hugo Heller invited a handful of Europe’s intelligentsia to submit a choice of “ten good books.” I’m sure many of those invited like Arthur Schnitzler and August Forel did as they were told. Freud, on the other hand, had to interrogate the question itself. It’s worthy of reproducing in its entirety here, since very few of you are likely to pick up the three volume set.

In Freud’s Words:

"You ask me to name "ten good books' without vouchsafing any explanation, and so leave it to me not only to select the books but also to interpret the request.

Accustomed as I am to heed minute signs I must adhere to the wording in which you couch your enigmatic request. You did not say the ten most magnificent works of world literature' - to which I should have had to reply, as would so many others, Homer, the tragedies of Sophocles, Goethe’s Faust, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Macbeth and so on.

"Neither did you say the 'ten most important' books, which would have necessitated including such scientific achievements as those of Copernicus, the book on belief in witches by the old physician Johann Weier, Darwin's Descent of Man, and others.

Nor did you even ask for my 'favourite books’, among which I should not have forgotten Milton's Paradise Lost and Heine's Lazarus. I think therefore that special significance attaches to your word 'good,' and that it carries the same implication as when we speak of 'good' friends, books to which a man owes some of his knowledge of life and his Weltanschauung; books which one has enjoyed and gladly recommends to others, but which do not evoke awe or dwarf one by their great stature.

"I shall name for you ten such 'good' books as they occur to me without much reflecting.

• Multatuli, Briefe und Werke

• Kipling, Jungle Book

• Anatole France, Sur la pierre blanche

• Zola, Fécondité

• Merekowsky, Leonardo da Vinci

• Gottfried Keller, Leute von Seldwyla

• Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Huttens letzte Tage

• Macaulay, Essays

• Gomperz, Griechische Denker

• Mark Twain, Sketches

"I do not know what you intend to do with this list. It seems very odd to me, and I cannot quite leave it without comment.”

At this point Freud goes into some detail about some of his choices, but I’ve decided to redact that. He closes with a similar kind of apology:

“Your request to name ten good books touches on something about which immeasurably much might be said. And so I conclude in order not to become more loquacious.”

Many of his choices may not be your cup of tea (or, like me, there are some you’ve never even heard of), I hope this little window into his mind will have made you like him a little more. I certainly did.

—

The above is directly quoted from The Life and Work of Sigmund Frued, Volume III, by Ernest Jones (1957) pages 422-423.