1st Edition
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.
The book includes a series of essays by Dr. Ahron Friedberg, a prominent Manhattan psychiatrist, concerning how his patients sought to achieve greater happiness during challenging periods of their lives, and how as a consequence they grew personally and professionally. Each chapter considers a core topic through the lens of Dr. Friedberg’s practice, demonstrating how patients worked through difficult, sometimes chronic personal issues. Throughout, there are useful summaries of key points. 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.
Towards Happiness offers honest insights into the compromises, sacrifices, and resulting degrees of success that characterize pursuing happiness, and will be of great interest to psychoanalysts, clinical psychologists, and other mental health professionals. It will also be useful reading for anyone seeking to understand the achievement of happiness in their own lives.
Foreword by Heather Berlin
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter I – Work and Money
Chapter 2 – Wellness and Personal Growth
Chapter 3 – Sex and Love
Chapter 4 – Family and Friends
Chapter 5 – Aging
Conclusion
Index
Biography
Ahron Friedberg, M.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Editor, The Academy Forum of the American Academy of Psychodynamic Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis. Book Editor, Psychodynamic Psychiatry. Co-Chair, International Council of Editors of Psychoanalytic Journals. Served twice as National President of the American Society of Psychoanalytic Physicians. Recent books include Psychotherapy and Personal Change: Two Minds in a Mirror (Routledge 2021) and Through a Screen Darkly: Psychoanalytic Reflections During the Pandemic (Routledge 2021).
Sandra Sherman, J.D., Ph.D., formerly a Senior Attorney in the U.S. government and Professor of English at two major universities. Currently, a Principal at ChildsPlay International, an organization that helps children around the world to realize the benefits of play. She is the author of four books on cultural history, and co-author of several books on neuroscience, as well as co-author with Dr. Friedberg on Psychotherapy and Personal Change and Through a Screen Darkly.
"Happiness is a lot like sex and sleep—the more you pursue it, the more elusive it is. Rather, it has to be allowed. That typically means removing the psychic stumbling blocks that we unwittingly construct. And who better than the wisest of psychiatrists to reveal how we get in our own way? In Towards Happiness, Ahron Friedberg takes us on a guided tour of the inner conflicts, cloaked emotions, blind spots, and just plain lousy self-management that keep us from getting what we most want. It’s a trip you can’t afford to miss." - Hara Estroff Marano, Editor at Large, Psychology Today
"Dr Friedberg's Towards Happiness, which follows his acclaimed Psychotherapy and Personal Change, continues to explore our psychotherapeutic odyssey with a gift for empathy and moral wisdom. It shows us that happiness is not just a mood but, as he says, a labor ‘of grit, resilience and determination’-- a conquest, as Bertrand Rusell puts it. Dr Friedberg abandons the old cliché of the therapist dispensing his views from on high. Instead, he challenges us to share each other’s dramas and narratives, so that we can discern a way forward towards our own happiness." - Henry Lothane, M.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine, Mt. Sinai
"Towards Happiness offers a series of true-to-life stories about real people and follows their literal pursuit of happiness. Their trials and travails offer guidance by example. The stories follow the protagonists as they try, make mistakes, brush themselves off, try again…there is a sense of real life, as well as of real drama. But more to the point, anyone can learn from these relatable, immensely human accounts. The lessons are ones that you can actually use because you see how each lesson was learned." - Arnold Richards, MD, Founding Editor, International Psychoanalysis
"In Towards Happiness, Dr. Friedberg has made an incredibly sensitive study of actual lived experience. In this collection of intimate portraits, he demonstrates the imagination, courage, wisdom, and unflagging effort necessary to create happiness where it has been lost." - Harold Bronheim, M.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine, Mt. Sinai
