ABSTRACT
The recent social experience/experiment the COVID-19 pandemic shifted so much of social life – including psychotherapy – onto the small screens of our laptops and mobile phones. Yet the possibilities of computer-mediated psychotherapy go even further than connecting patients and therapists via Zoom. Many companies have begun to develop and release AI-enabled virtual therapy apps, including AI-driven chat-based interfaces (or “chatbots”) designed to operate independently from human therapists. While AI-driven applications such as chatbots offer potential opportunities for the mental health field, they also raise important clinical questions that remain to be carefully considered, such as how to think about the role of transference in a psychotherapeutic relationship involving a chatbot. Looking at the origins of chatbot technology in the 1960s, this chapter shows how the question of transference was present at the beginning but was later neglected. Following this, the chapter considers different aspects of transference that may occur between a person and a chatbot from the point of view of the three Lacanian registers of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real. The chapter then closes with some reflections on and further considerations of the small screen as a specific sociotechnical assemblage and how this influences transferential relations with AI-driven psychotherapeutic chatbots.
