Towards
Happiness
Towards Happiness
BOOKS BY
AHRON FRIEDBERG M.D.,
WITH SANDRA SHERMAN, J.D., PH.D.
The duo has written four books together. In January 2023. Ahron Friedberg M.D. and Sandra Sherman won a coveted Gradiva Award for the book Through A Screen Darkly: Psychoanalytic Reflections During the Pandemic (Routledge, 2021). This book offers real-time, intimate reflections on Dr. Friedberg’s patients as they struggle with COVID-19 and its disruptive, dispiriting fallout.
FACES OF LOVE
Life Studies in Psychoanalysis: Faces of Love.
Life Studies in Psychoanalysis consist of four psychoanalytic studies, each representing a patient’s course of treatment over several years.
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Ultimately, 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.
TOWARDS HAPPINESS
A Psychoanalytical 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 happiness.
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.
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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.
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Psychotherapy and Personal Change shows how this exchange develops and how each actor is affected.
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.
The main theme of the book is that, of necessity, we learn to adapt.
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Offering a series of intense encounters with worried, traumatized people, this book will be invaluable to in-training and practicing psychiatrists, as it points to the several possible directions for our national, psychological recovery from the pandemic.