About Dr. Frieda Birnbaum, psychoanalyst in Saddle River

I’m Frieda Birnbaum. I have a PhD in Psychology, and I practise as a psychoanalyst here in Saddle River, New Jersey. I’ve been in private practice for decades, which mostly means I’ve been surprised by people for decades.

Why I do this work

At 60, I had twins.

It was not a quiet decision. It drew a great deal of national attention — ABC’s 20/20 with Barbara Walters, Oprah, Fox News, talk shows, radio, and a considerable amount of opinion from strangers about what a woman my age was permitted to want. I had thought a lot about the question before I lived it. Living it taught me something I could not have got from the reading.

What I learned is how much of a life gets quietly decided by a script nobody remembers writing. When it’s too late. What’s appropriate. Who you’re allowed to be at 40, at 60, at 75. Most people don’t argue with that script. They just feel it as a low, constant sense that the interesting part of their life is behind them, and they call that being realistic.

I found out, in the most public way available, that the script is negotiable. That is why I work the way I work, and it’s why so much of what I do sits around women’s lives, marriages, families, and the transitions people are told they should have finished having.

It’s also why I wrote the book.

The books

Life Begins at 60: A New View on Motherhood, Marriage, and Reinventing Ourselves was published by Skyhorse Publishing. It’s about the years people are told to spend winding down, and what happens if you decline. If you want to know how I think before you meet me, that’s the most honest place to look.

It wasn’t the first. Years earlier I wrote What Price Power: An In-Depth Study of the Professional Woman in a Relationship — the same preoccupation from earlier in a life, about what a woman’s ambitions ask of a marriage and what the marriage asks back.

I also host a podcast, Redefining Age with Frieda Birnbaum, which is the same argument, continued.

The media work

National outlets call me when a story touches families, marriage, parenting, or growing older — ABC’s 20/20, Oprah, Fox News, national talk shows and radio.

I’ll be straight with you about why that matters to you, which is: barely. It is not a reason to trust someone with your marriage. Being on television is a qualification for being on television. The only thing it should tell you is that when people need someone who will answer the question actually asked, in plain language, without hedging for eleven minutes, they tend to call me. You’d get the same in the room. That part is worth something.

How I work

I practise psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. In plain terms: I’m interested in why, not just what. Not the argument you had on Tuesday, but the pattern the Tuesday argument belongs to — usually one that started long before your partner was in the picture.

That’s slower than a worksheet, and I won’t pretend otherwise. What I can tell you is that you’ll get an honest read from me rather than months of sympathetic nodding, and that I won’t flinch at whatever you’ve been carrying around. I’ve heard it. Probably last week.