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

**Aaron Balick** (0:00)
Freud very famously said, you know, the ego is not the master of its own house.

**Shekhar Natarajan** (0:08)
I got to excel in my education because education is the only way I get the escape velocity in my life.

**Aaron Balick** (0:20)
Freud says basically, you want to marry your mother, and it's not that way. You actually, you kind of create your mother, or you create your father, or you create parental dynamics in each other.

**Shekhar Natarajan** (0:35)
As though my life depended on it, and if I don't do it, I'm going to get screwed.

**Aaron Balick** (0:43)
You start seeking more and more validation, and you're getting less and less recognition. So it's more and more like junk food, and less and less like a nutritional meal.

**Shekhar Natarajan** (1:16)
Welcome to another episode of Tomorrow, Today with Shekhar Natarajan. It's my incredible honor to have Dr. Aaron Balick.
He's a depth psychologist, which is super interesting as a term, like I would like to unpack that for us. Speaker, columnist, journalist. Are you a journalist?

**Aaron Balick** (1:39)
Not quite, I would, maybe one day.

**Shekhar Natarajan** (1:40)
GQ, right?

**Aaron Balick** (1:41)
For GQ, I guess, right?

**Shekhar Natarajan** (1:42)
And he's also basically a psychotherapist, right? So it's my incredible honor to have you on the show, sir. And I would love to, for the listeners, to kind of understand what depth psychology really means.
How do you explain it? And what are the implications to people in general, society in general? How do you kind of decipher all of this? Your life journey and whatever you want to talk about. Because this is your show. This is your show. And I'm here to basically just ask a few dumb questions here and there, but largely guided by you.

**Aaron Balick** (2:22)
Okay. Wow. So the one thing about depth psychology is we're terribly bad at marketing ourselves. It goes all the way back to Freud. You ask, what is psychoanalysis? And it's like, well, let's start. Maybe three hours later, you'll get a sense.
So the very brief definition is that depth psychology is inclusive of all the psychoanalytic theories that really prize unconscious process. So today, because we're very much into our outcome measures and 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 better.
With that psychology, we're looking at what are the underlying processes that I'm not aware of, what might be informing that anxiety, 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's arising and what you want to 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 that psychology is interested in inferring from the surface, what's going on underneath the surface.

**Shekhar Natarajan** (3:48)
Wow. How do you do that?

**Aaron Balick** (3:51)
It's difficult, right?

**Shekhar Natarajan** (3:55)
It sounds like the modern day LLM. I don't know how the hell it works.

**Aaron Balick** (4:00)
Yes. But I think with the modern day LLM, I was thinking about this, it's really interesting because LLMs take you at face value, they're not making inferences so much. They may be able to be programmed to. But if you're speaking, so if someone is speaking to me, a patient is speaking to me, they might say, I really love my mother.
An LLM is going to hear, I really love my mother. I'm going to hear, you say you really love your mother, those are the words, but there was something about your voice that felt like almost there was an aggression in it, and your face was quite stolid in that moment. I'm curious about what's going on inside you when you say, I really love my mother, because it's much more than that expression.

**Shekhar Natarajan** (4:43)
So like you're trying to find for like intent and deception.

**Aaron Balick** (4:47)
And deception of the self even, right?

**Shekhar Natarajan** (4:50)
Self, yeah. Got it, got it, got it, got it. So basically, it's the kind of the unpacking of like, the things that are not so obvious.