Psychoanalytic Dialogues

Generative AI, especially chatbots, presents psychoanalysis with tremendous promise and significant peril.  While some benefit tremendously from their AI relationships, others sink into delusion, and for most they threaten to flatten inner life, externalizing what has always been internal. Plus, so called “therapy-bots” are on the near horizon with both promise and peril. Overall, if you're not at least a little anxious about AI's transformations to self-experience, intimate relationships and professional life, you're not paying enough attention. But anxiety need not lead to denial, retreat, panic or paralysis. This presentation offers a path toward active, informed, and hopeful engagement on the side of human needs, psychoanalytic values, and affirming life. It argues that hope, not fear, should drive our response. Active participation combined with critical, contemplative, and deeply psychoanalytic engagement can secure not just survival but a thriving psychoanalysis for the AI age. Three dimensions of this AI-age psychoanalytic activism will be explored. First, why hope provides the essential foundation for AI-age psychoanalytic activism in our moment of accelerating technological transformation. Second, how to develop the procedural knowledge necessary for authentic psychoanalytic engagement with these technologies so one can move beyond abstract fantasies to embodied understanding. Finally, a new framework of "techno-subjunctivity" for understanding the unique qualities of chatbot intimacies will illustrate what it looks like to practice hopeful, AI-age psychoanalytic activism.

Learning Objectives

• Attendees will be able to list three concrete steps they can take to support their own AI-fitness journey in professional settings.

• Attendees will be able to describe one specific way chatbot relationships can cause psychological or relational harm in real-world contexts.

• Attendees will be able to describe the two registers of techno-subjunctivity and explain how each operates in human–AI interaction.

CME/CE Accreditation

ACCME Accreditation Statement
This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the accreditation requirements and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) through the joint providership of American Psychoanalytic Association and Western New England Psychoanalytic Society. The American Psychoanalytic Association is accredited by the ACCME to provide continuing medical education for physicians.

AMA Credit Designation Statement
The American Psychoanalytic Association designates this live activity for a maximum of 2 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit(s)™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

Disclosure Statement
The APsA CE Committee has reviewed the materials for accredited continuing education and has determined that this activity is not related to the product line of ineligible companies and therefore, the activity meets the exception outlined in Standard 3: ACCME's identification, mitigation and disclosure of relevant financial relationship. This activity does not have any known commercial support.

This program is being reviewed for Continuing Education Credit Hours by the National Association of Social Workers, CT. Once approved, it will meet the continuing education criteria for Social Work Licensure renewal, Marriage & Family Therapist Licensure renewal, Professional Counselor Licensure renewal and Licensed Psychologist Licensure renewal.