Summaries
We open the AI section with an insightful text by S Brahnam, which brings to light numerous key issues regarding AI as a potential instrument for psychoanalysis. Questioning Artificial Intelligence in Psychoanalysis, frames Large Language Models (LLMs) as “talking things” in opposition to speaking beings, raising important questions about the logic of “communication” in either with respect to which the existence of the unconscious is at all posable. In this illuminating essay, the author describes the linguistic mechanisms of AI thereby problematizing the automation of the function of the analyst , and introduces critical concerns regarding whether such a technology would even be ethical. Taking into account the foundational notion that psychoanalytic work is constituted by unconscious formations whose logic necessarily depends on repression and desire, the paper shows the present structural limits of constructing an AI that could model the negative (i.e. silences, omissions, absences, etc) in the transferential dimensions of the treatment.
The following selection, composed by Marc Heimann, offers a clear account of the complex workings of LLMs, providing several crucial theoretical coordinates for the exploration of this presently paradigmatic form of generative AI When the Machine Free Associates: Psychoanalysis in the Age of AI proposes a conceptual shift of focus, namely that the meaning of AI is not to be found in the model itself, but in its material inscription of a text, a digital body capable of hosting the mark of the signifier. Drawing on Lacan’s notion of the body as a locus of the Other and the idea of corps-sistance, the text shows how the mechanisms of so-called transformer models enact metonymy and metaphor in ways that mimic free association while actually lacking the structure of lack. Functioning as a psychotic hallucinatory process entrapped by an affirmative circuit, the machine reveals something of our own alienation in language.
In the subsequent text, Matt Johnson interrogates the functioning of chatbot therapies given the burgeoning interest in automated treatments. Entitled Artificial Analysis: Taking Chances with the Imaginary, this dynamic essay frames the question of if AI could ever function from a “purified psychoanalytic position,” or whether technological advancements in the field inevitably lead to a “chatting cure.” Returning to Freud’s notions of analytic listening, as well as Lacan’s critique of the ego psychology and engagement with cybernetics, the essay emphasizes how the imaginary dimension of LLM’s precludes the machine from occupying an analytic position. Tracing the history of LLM’s and their algorithmic modes of functioning, the text brings to the fore numerous problems in the development of clinical technologies suggesting that such models simply reflect the “impurities” of normative discourse.
We continue with Daniel Tutt’s absorbing essay, AI, Daydreaming, and the Freudian Theory of Aesthetic Creation, which decisively challenges the contemporary panic about AI by arguing that fears of mass job displacement and creative obsolescence are driven less by autonomous technological progress than by capitalist imperatives that historically shape automation. Drawing on Marx, Freud, Hanns Sachs, Adorno, and Ernst Bloch, it contends that creativity and art are fundamentally social acts rooted in daydreaming, unconscious wish-fulfillment, and collective imagination—dimensions AI cannot hope to replicate. While AI may duplicate the content of art, it cannot generate the shared social, political, and future-oriented “mutual daydream” that gives art its transformative power, making the real threat to creativity a reduction of art to data and utility rather than the machines themselves. A worthwhile analysis of our contemporary moment.
Our next text, by David Pavón-Cuéllar argues that contemporary culture—and psychoanalysis in particular—is increasingly absorbed into digital technologies that can process information and “think” but lack true knowledge because they exclude the human subject. Entitled The Unconscious in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, The Scientific Suppression of the Subject and the Technological Jouissance of Capital, and drawing on Lacan and Marx, the author claims that knowledge requires a subject who enjoys acquiring and using it, something lacking in computers, AI, and technoscientific systems dominated by capitalist logic. As knowledge is transferred from workers to machines and ultimately owned by capital, the subject of the unconscious risks being suppressed or even disappearing altogether, with psychoanalysis and Marxism standing as fragile sites of resistance where the subject can still return through lived praxis rather than data, metrics, or market exchange.
We finish our first round of essays with Nicolle Zapian’s Threats to the Beginning and Ending of an Analysis in the Times of Technology and AI. Turning the essay-form to account, Zapian carefully reflects on how contemporary technology- and AI-saturated culture has reshaped patients’ expectations of psychotherapy in ways that make both beginning and ending psychoanalysis more difficult. The author argues that constant access to information, AI assistants, and on-demand therapeutic substitutes reinforce fantasies of omnipotence, certainty, and limitless availability, undermining the analytic process, which depends on not-knowing, limitation, transference, and the capacity to tolerate frustration and loss. As patients increasingly consult AI, coaches, or digital tools alongside or instead of the analyst, the transference “leaks” and analyses are harder to initiate, and terminations are postponed or avoided altogether, threatening psychoanalysis’s core aim: helping subjects relinquish omnipotence, confront limits, and achieve freedom to think, work, and love.
