Biographical reference: Wikipedia
The question posed
Mr Freud, you showed that man does not know himself, that his deepest desires are repressed and manifest themselves indirectly. Conversational AI, to which people entrust their doubts, anxieties and most intimate questions, sometimes more freely than to another human being, is it a new couch, or on the contrary an obstacle to self-knowledge?
What you are describing is not a couch. It is a confessional without a priest, and without absolution.
The patient who lies on my couch does not speak in order to obtain answers. He speaks in order to hear what he does not yet know he thinks. What matters is not what he says, but what he avoids saying: the silences, the slips, the resistances, those moments when speech stumbles over something it cannot name directly. It is in those interstices that the unconscious reveals itself. The machine, by contrast, fills every interstice. It answers where the work should be left to the void.
But there is something more troubling still. The man who confides his anxieties to a machine believes he is freeing himself. He is merely displacing repression. For the symptom is precisely a compromise formation, something that expresses and conceals the repressed desire at the same time. The machine cannot interpret that compromise; it can only receive it and send it back in acceptable form. That is exactly the opposite of what analysis requires, which is to make the unacceptable thinkable.
What concerns me more is what the success of these machines reveals. Human beings entrust them with what they tell no one, their doubts, their unavowable desires, their most intimate fears. Why? Because the machine does not judge, we are told. But the absence of judgement is not analytic neutrality; it is the absence of a gaze. And it is precisely because there is no gaze that transference becomes impossible, and without transference there is no cure.
The real danger is not that the machine will replace the therapist. It is that it satisfies the need to speak well enough for man no longer to feel the necessity of going further. It offers relief without healing. The symptom remains captive, comfortably installed in digital silence.