ABSTRACT
There is great optimism in the efficacy and popularity of “therapy bots,” which utilize artificial intelligence (AI) to provide interactive psychoeducation and evidence-based interventions. What is interesting about this development from a relational psychoanalytic perspective is not the overt problems that therapy bots promise to solve but the philosophical ones: issues related to human limits, subjectivity, and finitude. Therapy bot enthusiasts project advantages in the future such as encyclopedic knowledge of symptoms and epidemiology, perfect recall of a patient’s history, and a Vulcan-like objectivity in perspective that would enable ultimate fidelity to evidence-based treatments. In this chapter, the author argues that the relational psychoanalytic framework offers compelling insights for the foundational importance of the psychotherapist’s personhood, including the limitations that this necessarily entails. These rich traditions help make the case that uncertainty and subjectivity are not the things to work around but the things to work with.
