Project for a Problematic of AI Technologies in Psychoanalysis 

We are delighted to open this new section in the Salon, focusing on the crucial topic of AI, technology and its relation to psychoanalytic clinical practice. As a singular problem of the contemporary, the present realities of networked digital information technology, especially as propelled by the recent incarnation of generative artificial intelligence, is such that it cannot leave psychoanalysis untouched. Already, in the growing milieu of technological organs in which we find ourselves, we are bearing witness in our clinical work to the effects of the swamp of digital apparatuses in the psychic lives of our patients, often directly traceable to their interactions with a slew of virtual conversational agents and the Large Language Models (LLMs) that power them. The effects have been far from abstract, materialising as they are in our patients’ relation to language, to discourse, to metaphor, and indeed in the very empirical way they interact with us – among especially the young, a nervous, anxious form of discourse, prone to panic and often in a hyperconcrete and predominantly operational mode of thinking that bypasses or obviates the symbolic imagination, a function whose existence we count on as the lever of the unconscious and treatment, but which today seems to have been thrown deeply into question. As analysts, we are therefore hardly flabbergasted to find arising in the world “new” illnesses such as “AI psychosis,” which we can readily apprehend as the Real of algorithmic machines wreaked upon bodies increasingly without recourse to signifiers with which to treat and represent subjective experience.

What is not to be downplayed is the way this twittering array of generative AI software and social media platforms have effectively supplanted the locus of the Other, becoming at once synonymous with the social field as well as a stand-in for the Ego-Ideal which has long been in the process of collapse as Oedipus, our name for the psychic process of subjective initiation in kinship and wider social structures, gives way to Narcissus, our new psychic avatar of collective life defined by the evacuation of the paternal function. Among other things, as Christopher Lasch (2018) has shown so well, what this is giving rise to are psychic subjects nakedly dominated by archaic fantasies and aggressive and destructive drives, especially where there prevails an absence of prohibitions or a general permissiveness, in ways not indirectly promoted by our technological culture itself. A widespread inability to form positive social bonds are among some of the many psychic results of this process, which extends to the analytic relation of transference. 

To a degree that we have not been able to foresee, this rapid dissolution of the social bond and what appears to be the decline of the symbolic function itself ushered in by our technological epoch, are today the clinical realities the psychoanalyst confronts. Thus, contrary to the claims of our more sycophantic colleagues in the Lacanian field whose wish to venerate the erstwhile Master seems to override what they may be experiencing of clinical reality themselves, we want to open the space for a collective discourse on AI and technology premised on the idea that we are not already in-the-know, and that the position of the patient in light of our present technological condition is not something which can be taken for granted, but is rather what demands redescription – in ways that, yes, even “the late Lacan” did and could not manage to encompass. 

Our objective in this initiative is therefore to construct a new problematic of the relation between psychic and technological apparatuses in the present day. In the form of an ongoing dialogue, we want to bring together critical analyses and reflections from practising psychoanalysts and analytic therapists as well as allied thinkers and theorists interested in posing the problem of technology from a clinically-grounded perspective, in the sense of a thought derived from the clinic, or a theorising that speaks directly to it.  In part, we are motivated by the funny circumstance we seem to find ourselves in today: while few thinkers of technology today ever write from a clinical perspective, even fewer analysts seem to be thinking and writing on technology although it is ubiquitous in their clinics. We recognise this as one of the great structural faults in our collective theoretical imagination, and also a legacy of the longstanding technophobia of modern Occidental thought. Yet, as these sorts of disciplinary or technical divisions are precisely what have become materially obsolete in our current technological conjuncture, we want to situate our new section of the Salon directly in this gap.

Here, we seek to assemble short writings that can speak to the central problematic of the way today’s technological apparatuses – platforms, codes, software, algorithms, and the like – evince themselves in the dynamic operations of the psyche, or how these can be shown to be dynamically and structurally related, since subjective bodies incorporate and stand as living testaments to transformations in the social field. While we cannot avoid mobilising concepts from existing frames and perspectives, we want to be wary of analyses that rely on the certainties of pre-established theories, and we caution against such hasty overcodings of the Real of what stands unpredictably before us with familiar concepts we have simply decided to regard as axioms (“jouissance,” for instance). More than ever, what we need is a form of the theoretical imagination which does not ultimately accord itself the privilege of having the last say, an imagination which can maintain an essential relation to the unthought. 

Specifically, what we are seeking are writings able to foreground observations and lend insights into key elemental correlations between psyche and technology, which we believe the analytic clinic is particularly well-situated to do. As such, these would ideally be analyses that are systematic, fine-grained and clinical, that keep close to the kind of perspective we find in psychoanalytic sessions, or even in that of ethnographic studies where empirical “minutiae” are handled in all their dignity as conceptual vectors, details rich in philosophical content, but whose “modes of existence” are precisely what is to be respected and brought into theoretical light – taking a leaf here out of the book of the late anthropologist Bruno Latour (2014), whose lessons in empirical metaphysics are stars still shining brightly in the firmaments of contemporary thought. 

Our use of the concept of the “problematic” here, then, is deliberate. In the original sense, a problematic does not just mean problems or asking a set of questions about them, but is rather the construction of a matrix and an angle of analysis (such as we have been laying out) such as to make it possible and even necessary to begin to formulate a certain number of precise problems (Bachelard 1949, Maniglier, 2012). What is paramount in a problematic is thus, first of all, the attempt to establish the position of the problem at hand – in this case, that of the patient – prior to any treatment whatsoever, as Lacan might have put it.  We find this approach incisive in that it opens us a space of inquiry that allow us to register and to follow, as does the psychoanalyst, the most minute and evanescent phenomena, signifiers, or behaviours in their concrete relations to the complexes that structure them, while refraining at the same time from the urge to pre-comprehend or to conclude too quickly. It is an act of building out the problem at hand given that it cannot be assumed to be pre-constituted.   

In discussing the importance of constructing problematics, Bachelard thus gives the example of the theory of the dew point. To ask if dew comes from “inside” or “outside” of the plant is to presuppose it as an isolate, standing apart from other ones, and therefore to miss the point; the real inquiry begins when we ask how each level of dew forms out of a definite set of correlations between water vapour, barometric pressure, and temperature. Similarly, in the case of the speed of light, to ask if light travels “faster” in water than in air is meaningless, since “light” first has to be redefined relative to its behaviour as “wave” or “particle” in the differential situations of reflection, refraction and diffraction (Bachelard 1949, Maniglier 2012). We take this to be crucially important as a starting point for a problem as expansive as the technological system (Ellul, 2018) we confront today, which is growing more forms and running much faster ahead than the questions we can muster up to apprehend them. 

With regard to the life and the workings of the psyche relative to today’s artificially intelligent technologies, it is our view that the stakes, and the variables at stake, have profoundly changed. It is not simply that technology is “affecting” the psyche but, as the current studies on “internet addiction” and the “chronically online” youth overwhelmingly show, the technological apparatus today essentially depends on the psychic apparatus for its operation as such, so that psychic life itself figures as one of the links in a loop of technology’s self-reproduction. 

It is with respect to this new complex, this emergent variable of the relation formed by psyche and technê today that we are seeking to develop a new approach and a new language with which to grapple with what-is-coming-to-be. For us, a practice of psychoanalysis which continues to imagine itself as being able to stand at a relative remove from the present order of things, when all fields of life are coming into the fold of digital technological schematisation, is one not just out of step with the world, but a downright ethical failure in facing up to the new network of forces structuring the symptom and the unconscious today.      

In the spirit of that mighty universal sociologist, Gabriel Tarde (2012), then: 

Hypotheses fingo.