ABSTRACT
Auto-intimacy engages with therapeutic and psychiatric treatment by algorithm, or automated therapy, and interrogates what therapy becomes when the therapist is a computational actor. These applications are often grouped with teletherapy and telemedicine but definitionally and practically fall outside that genre. Building on scholarship on the early chatter bots ELIZA and PARRY, this chapter begins with a brief, situating discussion of those and other very early attempts to write a responsive algorithm that models a therapeutic relationship. I argue that computerized therapy is a form of “auto-intimacy” in which the human user produces a kind of self-knowing through an engagement with the natural language processing and therapeutic vocabulary of a computer program.
