The Hidden Psychology Behind Relationships, Trauma & Self-Awareness | Dr. Aaron Balick & Shekhar Natarajan

So the one thing about depth psychology is we're terribly bad at marketing ourselves.

That goes all the way back to Freud.

You ask, [clears throat] "What is psychoanalysis?" And it's like, well, let me...

Let's start, and maybe three hours later you'll get a sense.

Mm-hmm.

So the very brief definition is that depth psychology is inclusive of all the psychoanalytic theories that really prize unconscious process.

Mm.

So today, because we're very much into our outcome measures and, uh, things that we can see numerically, things that we can prove, we really like CBT because you can say, "I walk into a session with an anxiety level of seven, and I walk out of the session with an anxiety level of three, so I'm, I'm better." Um, with depth psychology, we're looking at what are the underlying processes that I'm not aware of? What might be informing that anxiety?

Mm.

What is the meaning of that anxiety? Is that anxiety a symptom, a sign of something that needs to be addressed? The solution may not be about alleviating the symptom, but understanding why it, why it's arising-

Mm

... and what you wanna do about that.

And a lot of that stuff is unconscious.

So Freud very famously said, you know, "The ego is not the master of its own house." The ego is a part of consciousness that has awareness of its internal world and the external world.

Lots of unknowns in the external world, but also loads of unknowns in the internal world, and depth psychology is interested in inferring from the surface what's going on underneath the surface.

Wow.

How do you do that?

It's difficult, right?

[laughs]

And it's, it's difficult.

It sounds like, it sounds like the modern day LLM.

I don't know how the hell it works.

Yeah.

[laughs]

[laughs]