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 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 listener's 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 listening for anyone seeking to understand the achievement of happiness in their own lives.

About the Author

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).