AMBITION & CAREER
Ambition is a form of vitality — an energy that gives shape and motion to desire. Its earliest meaning comes from the Latin ambitio, “a going around,” capturing the restless movement of reaching toward something.
Many people who come to therapy are deeply driven. They think, build, and create with a particular kind of focus, often prioritizing work or achievement more than they realize. Conversations return to work, not simply as employment, but as a place where questions of meaning, identity, and worth are constantly negotiated.
Work is rarely just practical. It is emotional. Psychological. Often unconscious. The self that goes to work is never separate from the child who once learned what effort could earn, what excellence might secure, and what vulnerability might cost.
Early experiences of being recognized or overlooked, rewarded or ignored, shape how ambition organizes itself long before we can name it.
Ambition carries family history, cultural expectation, and unconscious loyalty. What you feel compelled to build may continue an old story, or attempt to repair one.
In a city like New York, these forces are amplified. Cultural ideas about success become louder, faster, more insistent. The city itself becomes a force, intensifying both desire and pressure, shaping what feels urgent, necessary, or worth pursuing.
Therapy becomes a place where ambition can be understood not only as drive, but as story and attachment.
Ambition channels early longings to be seen, chosen, and impressive. It can also become a site of autonomy or creativity that once felt forbidden. And for many, ambition carries its own pull: striving itself can feel exciting, pleasurable, even seductive — a way of feeling awake and alive.
At the same time, ambition often exists in tension with other parts of the self: the part that wants rest, the part that quietly wonders what all the striving is for. The same energy that animates and excites can also exhaust other ways of being.
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