Aaron Balick 🍉
@aaronbalick
Psychotherapist & keynote speaker applying depth psychology to tech, AI & modern culture. Author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking. Columnist at GQ. aaronbalick.com
The thing about dogs is that they have no ego. Without an ego they don’t defend themselves from loving or being loved. Without a sense of episodic time, they don’t fear future loss. Their hearts are open and they love completely. Ergo, a dog’s love lacks the very neurosis that dogs human love.
Boy, D.H. Lawrence has a way of putting into words how exciting it can be to read Freud!
Satisfyingly back at the writing table. I envisage a productive period!
Well there’s an area of knowledge in which I wasn’t aware I had any expertise…
AI is to actual attunement as an actor playing a surgeon is to actually doing surgery. newsletter.aaronbalick.com/p/ai-is-gett...
How is AI like George Clooney with a scalpel? Subscribe to my substack and find out tomorrow morning at 9am UK time! newsletter.aaronbalick.com
For kicks and giggles here’s a photo of Freud boarding a plane for the first and only time in 1928. He didn’t like it. Have a nice weekend.
Psychoanalysing Half Man’s disturbing finale: Understanding dreams and the collective unconscious can help us make sense of Richard Gadd’s superb second series www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/psyc...
Horror fan pedants say headline writer needs to learn basic English grammar.
The sixties was a top decade for soft back psychology book covers.
The world may be on fire, but for just this moment my dog and I are just going to share this brief patch of winter sunshine together in inter-species harmony and peace.
They should make a dating app that matches you to all the others who made the same unique guessing combinations on the NYT #connections game.
Call it a schmaltzy musical - but I’m glad I grew up with this sort of messaging.
This is tonight’s entertainment. First because of the world situation. Second because of connections.
So excited that @poul-rohleder.bsky.social’s Oedipus book has arrived! It opens by pointing to a popular YouTube video that shows the enduring power of and some evidence for the Oedipus Complex. 1/2
AI sycophancy is wired into LLMs to keep you coming back for more. What are the psychological implications? Subscribe now and get the first of a series of articles staring Monday with: AI Therapy and Mental Health Part One: What We Know, What We Fear open.substack.com/pub/appliedp...
If the horse is AI and the stable is mental health, well, the horse has already bolted. The situation is moving fast and can be utterly bewildering - but the consequences for mental health professionals and society at large are too important to ignore. 1/7 newsletter.aaronbalick.com
Did you know that Carl Jung’s PhD research was on séances? How did his interest in the occult and Eastern mysticism inform his theories? open.substack.com/pub/appliedp...
AKA: Reduce your wonderful complexity to a reductive caricature. More on this here: Forget ‘extroverts’ and ‘introverts’, there's a new way to categorise ourselves in town www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/a-ne...
Some Friday evenings I don’t know whether I watch a movie because I want to watch a movie, or I watch a movie so I can have popcorn. That I could make a big bowl of popcorn without an accompanying movie is, for some reason, unthinkable.
Shocking but not surprising. A chart in the FT Weekend showing a steep decline in conscientiousness & uptick in neuroticism (big 5 measure) over the past decade (US study).
Just had the holy crap moment that the chief of police in the original Naked Gun is Tony Soprano’s mother.
In can’t remember when I last read a book to page 800 with still some way to go!
I want to become a writer for whom this setting is the norm rather than the exception.