What is Applied Psychodynamics?
Applying the theory and practice from depth psychology to reveal the deeper meaning that other methods miss.
Applied Psychodynamics is a framework developed by Dr. Aaron Balick that applies depth-psychology outside the consulting room and onto culture. Psychoanalytic ideas like the unconscious, ego-defences, object relations, attachment theory are employed to examine and understand social artefacts like technology, AI, organisations, and politics, revealing the invisible forces that underly contemporary life.
What it is:
I originally developed this framework while writing my book, The Psychodynamics of Social Networking during my time as director of the Masters Programme in Psychoanalytic Studies at the Department of Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex. Drawing on two decades of clinical practice, teaching, and writing — I aimed to take what depth psychology already understands about individual minds and turn it outward, toward the cultural objects we make and use. Where a psychoanalyst infers unconscious material from what a patient says and how they say it, Applied Psychodynamics does the same with the apps that shape our attention, the AI systems that mediate our relationships, the organisations we work inside, and the political dramas we cannot look away from. It reads between the lines of contemporary life to ask what we are seeking, what we are defending against, and what — beneath the surface — these things reveal about us.
How is it different from other approaches?
Where traditional psychodynamic therapy is concerned with the individual, Applied Psychodynamics uses the same conceptual tools but turns them outward — asking not "what is wrong with this person?" but "what is happening in the relationship between people and the systems in which they are immersed?". I use the term psychodynamics because it encompasses a broader set of theories than psychoanalysis, including insights and practice from the Jungian tradition, object-relations, attachment theory, and contemporary relational psychoanalysis, all of which can be used to better understand how we engage with other people, objects, and increasingly technology, and how they become part of our internal world.
While behavioural psychology and behavioural economics — currently dominant in the discussion of technology design — focus on what people do and how to influence it, Applied Psychodynamics asks what people are seeking, what they are defending against, and the forces underlying their behaviour, all happening outside awareness. These two approaches are not in opposition, which is why much of my work applies the psychodynamic questions to existing research from these disciplines, offering another layer and an alternative perspective to their findings.
Where it comes from:
The application of psychoanalytic ideas goes right back to the beginning. Freud's book, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life was one of the first books to tackle this. In it, Freud examined the everyday ways in which the unconscious erupts into our awareness, whether we want it to or not. A good example of this is the "Freudian slip" where we accidentally say something that's psychologically true, but we've been trying to suppress, the old joke being:
A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but you really mean your mother.
Humour is one of the ways these things slip out, but they also show up in arts and culture, which he explores in the sculptures of Michelangelo, Jensen's book Gradiva, and Shakespeare's Hamlet. His followers have done much the same, for example Melanie Klein's exploration of one of Ravel's operas. The practice is a further development of the method of dream interpretation Freud describes in his seminal text The Interpretation of Dreams where the analyst seeks to understand the meaning of the dream (the latent content) from the dream itself (the manifest content) through a process of inferring themes from the patient's associations.
While that may seem a bit esoteric, I can assure you that psychoanalytic research methodologies have come a long way since then and have developed into accepted peer-reviewed qualitative research methodologies (see, for example the work of Anna Dreher, Stephen Frosh, and others).
What these approaches have in common is the recognition that the content that is usually investigated in research studies often misses the underlying forces that inform their results. For example, quantitative research methods in psychology gather numbers as a proxy for feelings (e.g. on a scale of 1 to 10 how anxious do you feel?). While this provides important information, particularly for large scale populations, they leave out the quality of the emotions they seek to measure. Qualitative methods usually approach smaller numbers of people in order to capture more nuanced information, for example, by interviewing subjects about their feelings. Applied psychodynamics takes this one step further by taking in not just the words of an interview, for example, but by listening in to the silences as well, observing body language, and attempting to get a felt sense of what is happening between people. The exact approach differs depending on the situation. For example using applied psychodynamics in a board room of a Fortune 500 company differs significantly from analysing a political event cultural artefact like a television programme or film.
How I use it:
The foundations of my work lie in the clinical setting. I am UKCP-registered psychotherapist practicing in Shoreditch, London with more than two decades of clinical experience. My clinical work has taught me something that has stayed with me: that the most powerful tools we have for understanding human behaviour are not necessarily most visible, measurable, or accessible ones. Depth psychology teaches us that we are driven by motivations that we are often unaware of; that we are shaped by patterns from early life that continue to shape us as adults; surface behaviours that may seem irrational are often intelligible once you can read the unconscious grammar beneath them. These unconscious patterns I am describing are called psychodynamics, employing a psychodynamic approach to understanding things is, quite simply, applied psychodynamics.
After completing my PhD in Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex, I went on to become the director of the MA at the Department for Psychoanalytic and Psychosocial Studies where I had once been a student, and became a regular lecturer on our post-graduate Applied Psychoanalysis course. It was during those years that I wrote my first book, the first of its kind to use applied psychodynamics to understand social networking. These experiences taught me that while psychodynamic tools have spent most of the last fifty years confined to academia and the consulting room, there was a great need for their application in business, leadership, culture, and society. As our technological environment rapidly began to shape our inner lives, social media and AI mediated our relationships, political dramas captivated our attention, dating apps designed by behavioural scientists directed our romantic lives — all of this has been left to be explained by clever marketers, massive tech giants, neuroscience, and behavioural economics. Those frameworks are useful, but they consistently miss something: the inner life of the people involved.
Since publishing The Psychodynamics of Social Networking in 2014 I have continued to develop applying my approach to a variety of different subjects that interest me. I have enthusiastically taken psychodynamic thinking outside the consulting room and applied through consultation, public speaking, and writing. The "applied" part really matters. This is not about armchair speculation, it is the practical application of clinical concepts — object relations, defence mechanisms, projection, the dynamic unconscious, the digitally mediated self — to the technologies, relationships, and cultural phenomena that shape us every day.
Where it applies
I use Applied Psychodynamics across the four main insight pillars that you can find on this website:
Including topics such as:
AI companions and chatbots: asking what kind of object is an AI companion in the inner world? What is it being asked to do — soothe, mirror, replace? What happens when the object never frustrates?
The algorithmic self: asking how being continuously tracked, predicted and summarised by AI systems shape the way we see ourselves and each other? Are we becoming co-authors of our identities with our algorithms?
Doomscrolling and digital compulsion: asking about the unconscious motivations of refreshing the feed. What anxieties are we trying to manage and what are the consequences of that?
The digitally mediated self: asking how is the self performed, extended, and disrupted by social platforms? What is the difference between validation and recognition?
Generative AI and the erosion of thinking: asking what happens to mental life when the friction of thought is outsourced? What capacities atrophy when they are no longer used?
Workplace, technology, and mental health: asking why do screens, apps, and surveillance tools take such a toll on people whose work isn't centred on them?
The framework isn't limited to technology — I have used it on political phenomena, parenting, leadership, and clinical questions about therapy itself in the digital age — but technology and digital culture have been the richest territory for it.
FAQ
Is Applied Psychodynamics the same as psychoanalysis?
No. Psychoanalysis is a clinical method conducted in the consulting room between a patient and an analyst, often over many years. Applied Psychodynamics borrows psychoanalytic concepts — the unconscious, defence mechanisms, object relations — and applies them to questions outside the clinic, especially cultural and technological ones.
What's the difference between psychology, psychoanalysis, depth psychology, and psychodynamics?
These distinctions tend to drive people nuts. Here's the simplest explanation. Psychology is the broadest term, encompassing the whole of the study of the mind. Today, mainstream psychology tends to see psychodynamic approaches as a bit niche, partly because they are difficult to evidence (which does not mean that they do not work). Psychoanalysis speaks to all of the traditions that started with Freud and traces him as their lineage and include things like object relations, attachment theory, and relational psychoanalysis (the line from Jung refers to itself as "analytical psychology" or Jungian psychoanalysis). Depth Psychology is an umbrella term to cover all the disciplines that seek to reveal and understand unconscious processes - Freud and Jung, and all the developments until now. Psychodynamics is the name for all of the unconscious psychological forces like, drives, feelings, defences, relational patterns, etc., that shape human behaviour, personality, and mental states.
Is it a therapy?
No. It is a way of thinking, not a treatment. The thinking is informed by my clinical practice, but the framework itself is analytic — designed for understanding — rather than clinical; it can, however, have therapeutic effects.
Who is it for?
Anyone trying to understand any aspect of contemporary life with more depth than most surface-oriented cultural commentary offers. In practice I use it to help organisations and leaders that are seeking deeper and more sustainable practices for aligning their mission and vision, creating healthy work environments, and to enhance flourishing work, intellectual, and creative lives; for helping journalists who wish to incorporate an accessible way to write about technology and society, and for creating keynote addresses that give audiences something unusual but strangely familiar. That's because while the word "psychodynamics" may be a bit alienating, we all experience them, so in a sense, it's the most familiar thing in the world.
Can I cite it?
Yes. My foundational text is The Psychodynamics of Social Networking (Karnac/Routledge, 2014). The ongoing development of the framework appears in my newsletter, Depth Psychology in the Digital Age in my monthly GQ column, and in the Insights and essays on this site.