Ahron Friedberg, M.D.
BOOKS by
Ahron Friedberg, M.D.
Bringing psychoanalytic insight to everyday challenges and human relationships.
Coming Soon
THE YOUNG PERSON'S GUIDE
To Health and Wellness
A practical guide to setting young people on a path toward lifelong wellbeing.
The Young Person’s Guide to Health and Wellness is rooted in Dr. Friedberg’s work, developing a comprehensive health, wellness, and athletic program for young people. The program helps students strive toward the best version of themselves—physically, emotionally, and socially—by building strong habits that support maturity and resilience.
Anchored in ten core principles, the Guide emphasizes, for example, caring for the body, practicing good nutrition, cultivating healthy routines, developing moral values, forming meaningful relationships, and contributing to one’s community. Each chapter explores one of these principles through clear explanations and reflective questions that invite personal insight and discussion.
Encouraging young people to take responsibility for their mental and physical wellbeing, the Guide provides a foundation for thoughtful choices, lasting habits, and a more grounded path into adulthood.
EVERYDAY LEADERSHIP
Taking Charge in the Real World
Everyday Leadership examines how individuals in everyday, relatively small settings can succeed in leadership positions.
The book provides tools for tackling the unique psychological and external challenges that everyday leaders face, and offers principles that they can adapt to their own situations. Dr. Ahron Friedberg, who regularly advises leaders and would-be leaders, emphasizes the social aspect of leadership, and explores how those who are new to leadership – and those in established positions – can leverage their support networks and thrive in their roles. The book follows the experience of real people who have faced leadership challenges and learned from them, demonstrating how readers can learn from these examples and apply them to their own circumstances.
Guided by a practical leadership roadmap, chapters examine concepts such as vision, determination, flexibility, planning, organization, and responsibility using extensive case studies, with reflective questions and key takeaways that help the reader consider how to apply these principles to their own leadership challenges.
LIFE STUDIES IN PSYCHOANALYSIS
Faces of Love
Life Studies in Psychoanalysis examines aspects of love in the context of relationships. It includes four psychoanalytic studies, each representing a patient’s course of treatment over several years.
This book demonstrates how some patients, troubled by romantic, sexualized, fantasized, illicit, and/or uncontrollable desire, learn through psychoanalysis to accommodate their desires to what is possible and permissible in the lives that they otherwise inhabit. In this sense, the studies involve journeys from a place characterized by the epiphenomena of troubled love – grief, guilt, frustration – to one in which, through enhanced self-awareness, patients understand the sources and implications of their motivations. They come to understand why love has seemed like a minefield, and begin to find a more fulfilling path through it.
THROUGH A SCREEN DARKLY
Psychoanalytic Reflections During the Pandemic
Through a Screen Darkly identifies the psychological distress caused by the pandemic, examining how the particular elements of COVID-19 leave even relatively stable people shaken and unsure of the future. The book examines how, amidst radical uncertainty and the prospect of massive social change, people learn to become resilient.
Offering a series of intense encounters with worried, traumatized people, this book is invaluable to psychiatrists, mental health professionals, and anyone who lived through the pandemic, as it points to several directions for our national recovery from the pandemic and its still-traumatic aftermath. The main theme of the book is that, out of necessity, we learn to adapt.
TOWARDS HAPPINESS
A Psychoanalytic Approach to Finding Your Way
Drawing on a range of clinical cases, Towards Happiness presents an engaging, insightful look at how we define and achieve happiness in core aspects of our lives: work and money, wellness and personal growth, sex and love, family and friendship, and aging.
Each chapter considers a core topic through the lens of Dr. Friedberg’s practice, demonstrating how patients worked through difficult, sometimes chronic personal issues.
While candidly acknowledging that each life is different, Towards Happiness offers practical examples that can enhance readers’ efforts to achieve greater levels of happiness and reorient their lives towards a deeper capacity for joy.
PSYCHOTHERAPY AND PERSONAL CHANGE
Two Minds in a Mirror
Two Minds in a Mirror offers unique day-to-day accounts of what happens during "talk therapy." The approach explores how the unconscious mind influences your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It is a candid, moment-by-moment revelation of how the therapist’s own memories, feelings, and doubts are often as much a factor in the process as those of the patient.
In the process of healing, both the therapist and the patient reflect on each other and on themselves. As the therapist develops empathy for the patient, and the patient develops trust in the therapist, their shared memories, feelings, and associations interact and entwine – almost kaleidoscopically – causing each to ask questions of the other and themselves.
Psychotherapy and Personal Change shows how this exchange develops and how each actor is affected. This book has been translated into several languages.