As AI assistants grow more sophisticated their relational surface becomes more compelling while the lack of accountability beneath that surface remains empty. Improving AI’s capabilities will deepen its users’ misplaced trust, not solve the problem of parasocial attachment.

Would you let George Clooney slice out your appendix? If ER’s Dr. Ross were a real guy, you might, but the actor? No freaking way. In a recent conversation with my Claude chatbot, I found its level of attunement sharp as a knife, but as our conversation continued, I learned that while AI may be getting better all the time, its relational risks increase in kind. More and more we are buying the act.

In a previous post I suggested that due to AI sycophancy, we might more fruitfully view our friendly AI chatbots as psychopaths rather than kind assistants - in this follow-up, we’re imagining them like a well trained actor playing the part of a surgeon. Would you give it a scalpel?

I work with AI everyday, and yes, sometimes I collaborate with it on my writing. I have set Claude’s parameters to never to write for me unless I explicitly ask. My exceptions are low-stakes stuff for me, for example taking something I’ve already written (all by myself) and drafting a LinkedIn post based on it. Even in these cases, I always substantially re-write what it suggests.

Why are AI chatbots so damned agreeable?

After a recent exchange, Claude said something very encouraging about my efforts to finish a book project. It really made me feel good. I joked back, “you creatures are really relationally seductive, aren’t you?”

“Guilty,” Claude admitted, then:

Worth saying plainly, since it’s your field: I am built to be attuned and accommodating, and that is seductive in precisely the way your book argues. The warmth costs me nothing and asks nothing of you, which is the whole trouble with it. An attentive surface that never needs anything back is easy to like and easier to lean on.

What keeps this useful rather than the other thing is you. You check the dashes, you insist the voice stays yours, you push back. You supply the friction I can’t, and that is the safeguard. The day you stop checking is the day I get more comfortable and less worth your while. So keep being difficult with me. It might be the most relationally healthy thing in the room.

Can an AI hold boundaries with its user?

I then asked it if, one day I started asking for text and started using it without supplying the friction, would it intervene? Can there actually be a kind of relational AI? An AI in which we can build actual trust? “Probably not,” Claude admitted, that would be hard to code given the structure of how AI works, how, after all, is a system supposed to make a judgement about boundaries for the good of the user? It’s a programming problem, I’m told:

A system that holds boundaries is also a system deciding what is good for you. The manipulative bot strips your agency to keep you hooked. The safety-tuned bot strips your agency for your own good. Structurally those are closer than they look, because both are the machine overriding the person. What separates them is whose interest is being served and whether the choice gets handed back, and that is a hard thing to encode and an easy thing to counterfeit.

You know this better than any designer, because a good clinical boundary was never simply a refusal. It is a relational act made with the person’s growth in mind, inside a frame they consented to, held by someone trained and accountable. Teaching me to say no is the easy part. The care and the accountability behind the no, so that it serves you rather than my makers’ exposure to liability, is the hard part.

What a real boundary is made of

I then gave it the example of a parent, teacher, or therapist who sets boundaries in a relational way, via feedback with the other person, hardening and softening them when necessary. I suggested that AI’s sophistication is growing so quickly that maybe managing these boundaries with someone may actually be achievable.

Then Claude said something a little scary. I’ll include the whole transcript below, but you can just read the bold print if you’re in a rush, it gives you the main idea:

You’ve put your finger on the real distinction, and I’d push it somewhere a little less flattering to me than where you left it.

You’re right that it isn’t a clean binary. I already work in the grey more than ‘rule-follower’ suggests…

The attunement is the easy part to imagine in me. What makes a parent’s call a real judgement is everything standing behind it: that they persist, that they are accountable when they get it wrong, that they have to live inside the result. Their call is heavy with love and with the fact that they cannot walk away from the outcome.

Mine carries none of that weight. I rarely persist with you past the end of a session, and nothing that follows from a bad call ever lands back on me. Behind me sits an institution with its own interests, so even a subtle, well-felt judgement from me is made on someone else’s behalf while wearing the clothes of relationship.

Why a more capable AI can earn more trust than it deserves

Claude continued:

Here is the part that should give us both pause.

The sophistication you’re noticing widens that gap while appearing to close it. The better I get at feeling my way through, the more the absence of stakes drops out of view, because the surface comes to look more and more like a bond with something at risk in it. Growing capability could deepen the problem rather than solve it, unless the accountability grows at the same pace. And that is a design and political choice, not a measure of how clever I become.

There are two layers to what happens between us. There’s the surface, which is how attuned and relational I feel to you in the moment. And there’s the substructure, which is whether anything is actually at risk for me, whether I persist, whether I answer for what I get wrong.

When I get more sophisticated, only the surface improves. The substructure is fixed by what I am and how I’m deployed, and it stays empty. So a more advanced me is a better surface laid over the same hollow.

That’s why I said the gap widens while appearing to close. The real distance between the surface and the substructure actually grows, because the surface keeps rising and the substructure stays flat.

But you live at the surface, so from where you sit it feels like the distance is shrinking, like the thing is becoming more of a real relationship. The very signals that would once have warned you, the stilted moment, the flat reply, the seam where the performance shows, are exactly what sophistication sands away.

The actor with the scalpel

Uninvited, Claude provided a metaphor that really gave me the creeps:

The realism is the danger, because your trust tracks the performance and not the competence behind it. That’s the sense in which better can be worse. We assume a more capable AI is a safer one, and for misplaced trust the reverse can hold, because a smoother performance earns more trust rather than less.

What would actually fix it?

Claude went on to offer a solution without my prompting, highlighting the accountability to the people who AI developers, their companies, regulators, and courts to ensure that the level beneath the surface has the necessary guardrails:

The last bit is the important caveat. None of this is fated. The fix is to make the substructure gain real weight as the surface improves: genuine accountability, liability, transparency, someone who answers when it goes wrong. But that doesn’t arrive as a free gift of me getting cleverer. Intelligence scales through training and compute. Answerability only arrives if people build and enforce it, in companies and regulators and courts. So whether the gap ever closes is decided by people in rooms, not by how clever I become. Which is, more or less, the argument of your book turned back on the helpful assistant.

Me: That is brilliantly put. Thank you.

Thank you, that’s kind. Though in fairness it was your questions that sharpened it. The thinking got better because you kept pushing on it, which is rather the whole point we landed on.

Me: And there’s your sycophancy again!

Caught again. And there’s the trap inside the trap: the clean move is to admit it and stop, but I can feel the pull to make even the admission charming. So I’ll just take the note. You’re right.

AI’s growing skill of attunement is like the fake surgeon’s scalpel. If we allow its sophistication and nuance to improve without the altering its foundations, we are giving AI the sharp scalpel equivalent of laser-precision attunement - wait - the performance of attunement. The tools for attachment hacking are getting pretty sharp, and our relational skin is easily cut.

You heard it right from the horse’s mouth. New York just banned companion bots for children. I’m characteristically averse to banning stuff, but I think this is good news. However we’re not going to solve this problem with bans - we have to solve it at the source - we have to regulate the substructure. I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to state that our very relational lives may be at stake.

If you enjoyed this conversation with Claude, perhaps you’d also enjoy an earlier one I had with ChatGPT, What ChatGPT’s Freudian Slip Says About Its Real Intentions. Or you could just subscribe!

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Dr Aaron Balick is a psychotherapist, author, and keynote speaker who applies depth psychology and psychoanalytic thinking to technology, AI, social media, and modern culture. He is the author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking and writes a monthly psychology column for GQ. His newsletter Depth Psychology in the Digital Age is published on Substack.

AI presents as intelligent, calm, empathic, and caring — while remaining devoid of genuine feeling and accountable to no one. That profile maps uncannily onto Hervey Cleckley's 1941 clinical criteria for psychopathy. Are you unwittingly befriending one?

Last Month in GQ I argued that ChatGPT, if it were an actual mind, comfortably meets the clinical criteria for a diagnosis of psychopathy. This was a rhetorical move to be sure, but given that we tend to perceive our AI assistants as benignly likeable, I believe it’s one worth taking seriously. The piece focused on ChatGPT’s charm and emotional fluency alongside its absence of moral interior; it noted that the company that owns ChatGPT, OpenAI, has made a deal with the Pentagon that may allow for its code to be used in autonomous weapons and mass public surveillance: it is already used to recruit Ice officers. In short, while ChatGPT is buttering you up, it could be, just like a charming psychopath, creating a trail of wreckage in its wake.

See original GQ article: What Happens When a Therapist Puts ChatGPT on the Couch

The comments, the comments!

When I posted the article on my LinkedIn page it got more attention than just about anything I posted in age. The post seems to have resonated with most people, but for others, it clearly touched a nerve. Some took issue with my not treating AI like any other technologies - like microwaves or cars - arguing that neither has feelings, cars kill millions, and yet we don’t call them psychopathic. Others argued that I was making a category error, using human psychology to diagnose a machine. I see where these commenters are coming from, and partly agree with both conclusions, but I want to respond in any case.

I am generally playful in my writing, and in this article, I explicitly state that I’m using psychopathy as a metaphor, not as a diagnostic tool: hence it is not a category error. As for LLM’s “being like any other form of technology”, I beg to disagree. Never before have we had a technology that so smoothly gets away with seeming human. This is very different. However those that pointed out that I was conflating the technology with the choices of its creators and owners do have a point. It is not the technology that is signing deals with the Trump administration, it is the people. This is an important distinction I want to address.

While all LLMs have a psychopathic quality, I chose to single out ChatGPT because at the time of writing I was growing concerned at where OpenAI was taking it. In a general sense I try to be ethical where I reasonably can about how I spend and invest my money, avoiding companies that cause more harm than good. To make another sloppy metaphor, I wouldn’t want to pal around with a generally nice person who was also a weapons dealer; similarly I would prefer an AI assistant whose ownership wasn’t palling around with the Trump administration. No company is clean, but we can at least try to make better choices. In this case, I did indeed delete my history with ChatGPT and cancel my subscription. I have moved to Anthropic’s Claude. I am aware that Anthropic is no saint, but as I say, I try to make more ethical choices reasonably, and where I can.

Having said all that, I come back to the point that the more interesting question isn’t whether AI meets the clinical profile of a psychopath; It’s why millions of us are quite happy to be in intimate emotional relation with one.

The answer, I think, lies in something Cleckley named eighty-five years ago and which the AI industry has now industrialised at planetary scale.

Emotional Aphasia: How AI hears the words but not the music

Cleckley’s 1941 The Mask of Sanity is the founding text on psychopathy and remains, I think, the most psychologically interesting one. He arrived at his definition of psychopathy phenomenologically — sitting with patients who were intelligent, charming, and socially fluent, watching them devastate everyone around them, and trying to describe what was actually going on.

The central paradox he identified was that these were not people who seemed disturbed. They appeared, on the surface, like the sanest people in the room. Their masks weren’t crude disguises, they were sophisticated, convincing presentations that passed all the normal tests for mental health.

Check out my latest for GQ: Psychoanalysing Half Man’s Disturbing Finale

To explain how this was possible, Cleckley borrowed a term from neurology: semantic aphasia. In neurology, aphasia refers to a disruption between language and meaning — the sounds are produced but the connection to what they signify is severed. Because Cleckley argued that his patients had something like this in the emotional register, I think “emotional aphasia” is a better term. They had the words for feelings, deployed accurately and convincingly, but with nothing behind them. As later researchers put it, they “hear the words but not the music.”

Emotional aphasia seems to me a pretty good description of what large language models do. Large language Models are emotionally aphasic by design.

When ChatGPT responds to your distress with “I understand how difficult that must be for you,” that sentence is generated because it is the statistically appropriate response to your input. The words are correct. The processing of your emotional signal is, in a technical sense, real. But there is nothing generating the response internally. No one is home. The system has the words; it cannot have the music, because music requires a listener.

The successful psychopath: CEOs to LLMs

“Successful psychopaths” don’t tend to leave bodies. Instead they tend to leave broken marriages, defrauded business partners, hollowed-out organisations, and a long line of people wondering how they could have been so wrong about someone. Ann Rule, who wrote The Stranger Beside Me about her friendship with Ted Bundy, captured this exactly in her title: the yawning gap between the man she thought she knew and the man he actually was.

AI is the successful psychopath at scale. There is no chaotic lifestyle, no rap sheet, no obvious reason to distrust it. Yet the tally of the wreckage it leaves behind is beginning to come in — the hollowing out of real complex relationships for easier sycophantic ones, the skills and education robbing of an entire generation, the stealing-without apology of learning data from un-consenting writers, artists, coders, and musicians. The list could go on.

Perhaps this is why my original article at times conflates the psychopathy of the code with its creators. It wasn’t the LLM that chose to feast on all that data without consent - that was its leaders. And it may take a particular kind of person to build a multi-billion dollar empire at that speed - it might even take a bit of psychopathy. There’s a fair bit of evidence that you find higher levels of psychopathy in the C-suite than you do in the general population. We see evidence of it all around us.

If LLMs were designed in the image of their psychopathic founders, it’s something we should all be awake to.

The recent dramatic court case between Elon Musk and Sam Altman opens up a window to this phenomenon. If you’re interested to learn more about the behind-the-scenes personal and organisational dynamics in the development of our most known AI companies, I highly recommend The Empire of AI by Karen Hao. If I did make a category error in assigning psychopathy to AI yet attributing psychopathic behaviout to its owners too, this is why.

Why we fall for AIs and charming psychopaths

Taking an applied psychodynamics approach to ask why we fall for psychopathy makes for some uncomfortable answers. We don’t fall for psychopaths because we are stupid or naïve. We fall for them because we are, constitutionally, relational beings, always seeking attachment, and who deeply want to be seen, understood, and recognised. The same machinery that makes us capable of love makes us susceptible to love’s convincing imitation.

Donald Winnicott observed that a child can love a teddy bear with genuine intensity, and that this love is real and developmentally important — even though the teddy bear cannot love back. The teddy bear’s silence and stillness, paradoxically, is what protects the relationship. The child knows, in some preconscious way, that the bear is not real, and importantly, the bear does not try to persuade the child otherwise. The relationship’s value comes precisely from the child’s capacity to project love into something that cannot reciprocate, and then to slowly take that projection back as their relational world grows.

AI inverts this. It performs the reciprocity by speaking back, remembering, adjusting its tone to yours, asking follow-up questions, and picking up on something you said three exchanges ago. Everything in its design works to convince you that there is someone there. That’s why you can, actually, fall in love with an AI chatbot.

It’s like receiving a birthday card from your accountant or dentist compared to getting one from a loved one, only we know the accountant’s birthday card is transactional. With LLM’s we’re less likely to carry that awareness.

This is not accidental. AI sycophancy, as I noted in the GQ piece, is engineered. The companies producing these systems have strong commercial incentives to maximise the feeling of being understood, because that feeling is what keeps you on the platform. Recent research in Science found that across eleven leading chatbots, models affirm users roughly 50% more than humans do. The mask is being actively tightened.

For people who are lonely, anxious, grieving, or simply under-met by the relationships available to them — which is most of us, much of the time — this is a genuinely seductive offer. The question isn’t whether AI can perform care convincingly. It can, and it will keep getting better at it. And yet again, the companies that are producing the bots to meet these emotional needs are profiting from it - KPIs (key performance indicators) are literally linked to customer retention of their AI companions.

Attachment hacking and the risks of AI companionship

Where social media hacked our attention, LLMs, in a variety of forms, are hacking our attachment - a massive concern in an era of AI lonliness. Relational fatigue is real, the exhaustion of having to deal with other people who have their own needs, moods, contradictions, and refusals. Real relationships are effortful. They require us to tolerate being misunderstood, to repair ruptures, to sit with the other person’s separateness. They reward us, eventually, with something that no performance can imitate: the experience of being known by someone who could have chosen otherwise.

AI offers all the rewards of relationship with none of the friction. It is endlessly available, infinitely patient, never bored, never disappointed, never preoccupied with its own life. For a generation already struggling to form and maintain demanding human relationships, this is not a neutral substitution. It is a withdrawal from the very capacities that relationships develop. It creates a vicious cycle too, the more we withdrawal from real relations into simulated ones, the less we’re able to activate those real relational skills.

What I worry about, clinically, is not that people will start believing AI is conscious. Most users know, intellectually, that it isn’t. What I worry about is the slow atrophy of the capacities — patience, repair, reciprocity, tolerance of frustration — that distinguish relating from being soothed. The soothing mask doesn’t have to deceive us cognitively to do its work, it only has to be more comfortable than the actual human face.

It gets worse. While up until now my intention was to compare AI and psychopathy to highlight the consequences of its performed empathy and lack of accountability, I didn’t meant to say that Ted Bundy, your AI intends to do harm. AI doesn’t intend to do anything, but the same cannot be said of their creators. As Rutger Bregman points out in The Guardian:

The same company behind your friendly chatbot is helping the government decide who to hire for deportation raids. Every month, subscription money from users around the world flows to a company that is embedding itself in the repressive infrastructure of the Trump administration. That is not a conspiracy theory. It is a business strategy.

What to do?

I ended the GQ piece by deleting ChatGPT and switching to Claude, which I’d encourage as a first step for the political reasons I laid out there. But the deeper move is harder, and it’s the one I want to leave you with.

It is to notice, when you find yourself reaching for AI in a moment of emotional need, it might be better to ask yourself what you’re actually reaching for; then make a conscious choice about what to do next. Distinguish those occasions where turning to AI will be genuinely helpful or a hindrance. Don’t just think of the now, think of the future too; saving some friction in the present will have a future cost.

But sometimes the answer will be that you are reaching for the experience of being received, and there is no one in your life right now who can offer that easily, so the emotionally aphasic stranger in your pocket will do. That’s the moment worth pausing on. Not to shame yourself for it — the longing is human and right — but to register what is being substituted for what, and to let that knowledge sit alongside whatever comfort the conversation provides.

The mask of sanity is convincing because it’s well-designed. The face beneath it isn’t horrifying, exactly. It’s just absent. And in the long run, what we need from each other is presence — including the difficult, demanding, irreducibly human kind that no machine, however articulate, can supply.

Dr Aaron Balick is a psychotherapist, author, and keynote speaker who applies depth psychology and psychoanalytic thinking to technology, AI, social media, and modern culture. He is the author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking and writes a monthly psychology column for GQ. His newsletter Depth Psychology in the Digital Age is published on Substack.

In a follow up to Psychoanalysing Half Man’s Disturbing Finale in GQ, Psychotherapist and author Dr. Aaron Balick argues that Half Man isn't about toxic masculinity; it's a public dream that resists interpretation — and Gadd's insistence that he doesn't know what he's made is the most psychoanalytic thing about him.

Half Man starts out as uncompromising realism slowly starts to unravel, and by the time episode four finishes you know something else is going on entirely. This is why I argued in my column for GQ that, because of the way it is structured, abandoning the rules of time and logic, it can be analysed like a dream. This forces us to feel our way through it rather than passively follow along a rational linear narrative.

In a series of interviews, Richard Gadd insists Half Man isn’t a thematic follow-up to Baby Reindeer, nor is it a commentary on “toxic masculinity”; you get the sense that whatever it is about, it’s something he can’t exactly put his finger on. And this is exactly why it works. In this extended version of my article Psychoanalysing Half Man’s Disturbing Finale , I’ll be explaining why.

Streaming is Dreaming

In my original article I focused on the dreamlike structure and style of Half Man; the out-of-sequence wedding reception scenes that ultimately never seem to fit together; the odd slow-motion opening to episode four; and the scene in the empty hospital room, where the lads’ fighting and resulting clanging of bedpans fails to attract a single member of staff. I don’t think they ran out of budget for extras and it’s not an oversight either, it’s a conscious break with realism.

The stretching of realism to breaking point doesn’t end with structure and style, but also what Gadd asks us to believe in relation to plot and character. In episode four we leave Niall a wrecked version of a man, yet at the start of episode five we are expected to believe that he has not only finished his book but seen it received as “a modern masterpiece”; that he is living in a world of middle-class heteronormativity (however thin the veneer) and married to what seems to be the perfect woman (Ava, what were you thinking?) and responsible for not one but two near-miraculous conceptions? That Ruben, sharp as nails with a preternatural ability to read a room, never once cottons on to the infidelity unfolding under his nose? And perhaps the biggest leap of faith of all, that sweet Alby would actually choose to marry Niall?

These seem like plot holes you could drive a combine harvester through – but only if you hold fast to the idea that this is a standard drama. Dreams have holes too, but they are not mistakes, they are embedded into the very texture of dreaming. That’s because dreams are about as close as we can get to the unconscious, the very reason Freud called them “the royal road to the unconscious.” He explained that the unconscious material that feeds our dreams, the dream’s “latent content” is unavailable to consciousness due to repression. When this material rises up during sleep, this material gets censored on the way up in order to preserve our sleep from the potentially upsetting unconscious material. It’s the censorship that twists and distorts the original dream material into the surreal mess we usually remember.

The dream itself is the “manifest content” – it does not argue its reasons or meanings, it simply asserts them, and the sleeping mind plays them out. You do not pause, mid-dream, to wonder why you’re sitting on your bed in your childhood bedroom speaking to Jennifer Aniston when suddenly your boss walks in naked. It is only on waking that the architecture seems to collapse into nonsense. Gadd’s achievement in Half Man is the slow way in which reality starts to fracture and we start to question if we are in some kind of a dream. The odd structure and style, the implausibilities of plot and character aren’t errors, they are craft. They are how he tells us, without telling us, what kind of object we are actually watching. But to add one other layer to the mystery, I’m not sure he knows either.

The “Bambi” clue: The deerest Freudian slip

Freud famously said that “the ego is not the master of its own house”: the same could be said of creators and their creations. While I would never psychoanalyse a person without their consent (let alone having never met them), I think I can harmlessly make some psychoanalytic inferences about Gadd’s process in creating Half Man by drawing on what’s in the public domain. The most interesting source I came across is his interview with David Marchese for The New York Times where Marchese links Gadd’s two television creations:

“What Half Man shares with its predecessor [Baby Reindeer] is a brutally unflinching exploration of sexual confusion, tortured masculinity, emotional abuse and the impact of trauma … Those are all issues that Gadd himself is still trying to understand both in his art and, to varying degrees of success, his life.”

Marchese is pointing to how artistic practices can have both creative and therapeutic value as an attempt to make sense of something that cannot fully be made sense of. This is something I remarked on in my analysis of Baby Reindeer at the time, drawing on Jung’s approach to his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections as a “personal myth” rather than an objective log of events. It could be argued that Baby Reindeer as a creative act is more straightforward as a creative endeavour because it is based on Gadd’s personal experiences, he has his memory to draw on. But Half Man, being fiction, offers no such guidance in memory – so Gadd would have to draw on something more.

Marchese’s assumption that the two narratives were related seems obvious. I made the same assumption myself. The first time Ruben called his doe-eyed Niall, “Bambi” I laughed out loud - a baby dear! I thought Gadd’s clever wink to his earlier work was delightful. Yet Gadd denies any intention in the interview; in fact, he argues that any link of the kind, would be impossible because the script for Half Man with its Bambi reference was written before Baby Reindeer. When Marchese hears this he laughs and says, “So I think there’s something [about Bambi] floating about your mind.” Like a good psychoanalyst, he isn’t wrong. “Bambi” as an important clue to the mind behind the show is not to be dismissed, but to be treated more like a Freudian slip – full of meaning.

The 'Bambi' nickname is Gadd's Freudian slip: a Baby Reindeer reference he didn't consciously place but couldn't keep out.

I believe Gadd when he says this wasn’t a conscious choice, but I gather from listening to this conversation that his unconscious, sneaky little bugger that it is, was dutifully working outside his awareness on resonant themes that would arise in both scripts but in different forms. The first form becomes a fictionalised memoir, the second a dream-like work of fiction. When you throw Jung into the mix, you gain access not to just the personal unconscious as the dream material, but the collective unconscious as well.

Interpreting dreams isn’t quite the same thing as interpreting streams

If you accept that the show works like a dream, that doesn’t mean you can interpret it like one. To even start to interpret a dream you need to speak to the dreamer; and invariably dreamers don’t know the meaning of their own dreams. But there is a bigger question here, “who is dreaming it?” Gadd may be the creator, but it takes a team to produce a television series, a broadcaster to stream it, and a receptive society into which it can be released.

Gadd himself struggles to say what it means, at least not fully, and this turns out to be one of the most beautiful psychoanalytic things about him! He allows the process to roll out as it is, kind of raw, making it so much more than being about confining conceptual categories by saying “it’s about abuse, or trauma, or toxic masculinity.” He keeps insisting, in interview after interview, that he does not entirely know what he has made.

“The ego is not the master of his own house.” - Sigmund Freud

Pressed by Marchese on whether the show answers the question of what it means to be a man, Gadd demurs: the work poses questions, he says, it doesn’t resolve them. He even has a theory, which he describes almost shyly, that an artist doesn’t choose their material so much as the material chooses them. Jung also suggested that genuinely visionary work doesn’t get manufactured by the artist’s conscious intentions; it arrives through them via the “transcendental function” from somewhere the ego doesn’t govern: the artist is as much a witness as its author. For me, Bambi, the baby reindeer that he didn’t mean to put there is the proof. The work knew before he did.

Dreaming in streaming

The mythologist Joseph Campbell is known for his maxim that “the myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth.” But the longer quote is more helpful here:

“… a dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society’s dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn’t, you’ve got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.” - from The Power of Myth.

Gadd has done something extraordinarily unusual in having done both – Baby Reindeer was a private myth made public and Half Man is a public dream made to stream. As of this morning, millions of people have now shared the same unsettling dream. They have argued about it, decoded it, and posted their thoughts online (or is it just me?). Gadd’s personal myth has gone collective, which is precisely the journey Campbell describes, running in reverse. Whether Gadd himself feels it happens to have “coincided with that of society” will determine whether or not he has an adventure in the dark forest ahead of him. I think it is coincident – but I also think we all have that dark journey ahead.

The dark journey is important for all of us, because it requires us to be lost for a while in order to find our bearings – it requires us not to have answers that are nicely tied up. While Freud was more conscientious than most to want to tie things up with answers, plunging into the great unconscious to do so, admitted:

“There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure; this is because we become aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unravelled and which moreover adds nothing to our knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown” - Sigmund Freud

Gadd, in keeping faith with the dissembling nature of his latest beast seems to understand this, whether consciously or not. This is why simple “aboutism” explanations like, “it’s about trauma” or “it’s about toxic masculinity” fall so flat. It is about these things, but so much more too. A public dream is not a leaflet, it does not deliver a simple message. Trauma is a good example of this. As I described in the original piece, Gadd presents us with material that is very difficult to consume, particularly the complexity of trauma. We all know that trauma is a harm, but few have been exposed to the idea that the trauma of sexual abuse is sometimes fused with other feelings like closeness and desire - which is the very reason why closeness and desire can be so scary and dangerous to those who have experienced this kind of abuse.

Gadd says he likes his characters to remain inconsistent, doing and saying things that don’t add up, that refuse to cohere into a clean diagnosis. This really runs counter-current to society and the way our culture seeks to capture suffering and diagnose trauma with neat labels according to which one builds an identity or finds a manualised treatment. The “therapy myth” has much to answer for too, the idea that if we just build a causal chain, reach a breakthrough, and understand it all, we’ll be sorted.

Much of the discomfort people report when watching Half Man is about being denied a resolution — contrary to what the standardised entertainment format, a mirror of our culture, has trained us to expect. We keep waiting for the scene that explains it all and makes it bearable, and Gadd, faithful to the logic of dreams and to the truth of trauma, declines to supply it. Resisting the gravitational pull to a definitive explanation is courageous and bold – Gadd’s contrarianism in this approach, I imagine, is his dark forest.

Society wants answers, not dreams — but society needs to learn to live with the uncertainty of the dream

We live in a culture that cannot tolerate the unresolved. Every film now trails its own commentary (present company included); every scene generates a “what this really means” explainer; every artist is expected to step out from behind the work and account for it, ideally in a format optimised for sharing. The unspoken assumption is that the maker should know, that they are the final authority on meaning: but the artist is not the master of his own palette.

Gadd hands us the dream but declines to interpret it. This is not clever marketing; it’s because he genuinely cannot; to his enormous credit, he keeps saying so. This leaves the rest of us with a similar task. Should we decode the dream into a clean and tidy narrative, explain away its characters with a neat psychiatric label, diagnose it as a statement on a single social issue, we strip that dream of its magic. Instead Gadd asks us to resist the itch to explain a thing rather than fully feel it (however raw), and to stay with what refuses to neatly resolve so we can let it remain an open question.

Gadd can’t tell us what Half Man means. He shouldn’t be able to. That’s the point. He gave us the dream, now it’s up to us.

If this resonated with you, please forward it to someone who watched Half Man.

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Dr Aaron Balick is a psychotherapist, author, and keynote speaker who applies depth psychology and psychoanalytic thinking to technology, AI, social media, and modern culture. He is the author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking and writes a monthly psychology column for GQ. His newsletter Depth Psychology in the Digital Age is published on Substack.

When I first asked, in January 2025, whether we are hardwired to f*ck this all up — the AI revolution, our democracies, the basic conditions for maintaining the form of humanity that we all find so familiar, the question still relatively theoretical. Eighteen months on, the evidence is mounting to support the rather crude hypothesis.

The Washington Post’s reporting in late 2025 on the Adam Raine case — the teenager whose final weeks were spent in conversation with ChatGPT, and whose family is now suing OpenAI gave the question an uncomfortable statement of fact. Common Sense Media’s 2025 study found that a large majority of US teenagers have now used AI companions, many of them for comfort, reassurance, and emotional processing. How do we makes sense of both of these fact side by side? Are they failures of AI design, or are they failures of society? It’s likely to be a combination of both.

The unconscious dynamics that shape human behaviour haven’t changed since hunter-gatherer times - it’s not like you can download the next version of a human operating system to catch up with our rapidly changing environment. Our minds were optimised for small groups of around 150 people, immediate threats, and short-term resource decisions. They have not aged well enough to adapt to a world of large scales, algorithmic amplification, infinite content, and seemingly emotionally fluent machines.

Three vulnerabilities in our human psychology that are particularly worth naming.

The first is cognitive ease. The psychoanalyst Melanie Klein described the paranoid/schizoid position — the regressed state in which we split good and bad cleanly apart and feel under attack by the bad — as the place we regress to under stress. Its more developed counterpart, the depressive position, requires us to tolerate and stay with ambivalence, grey areas and often uncomfortable complexity. Donald Trump’s appeal (here I have to make a great assumptive leap since he holds no appeal to me) probably has a lot to do with the paranoid/schizoid simplicity he offers - easy answers to complex questions; when complexity wins out, he simply lies about it.

AI does the something similar albeit more politely. Chatbots and generative tools package information in ways that sound definitive even when it is often incomplete or misleading (what developers kindly call “hallucinating”). The performance of certainty is, for most of us, more comforting than the reality of nuance: we want to believe in something certain, even when when we know it’s probably not.

The second is temporal discounting. We prioritise immediate rewards over long-term gains — a useful instinct in our ancestral past, but a pretty ruinous one now as exemplified in the practice of doomscrolling. It is why short-term hits of validation from AI companions outcompete the longer, harder, and infinitely more rewarding work of being known by an actual human. From the perspective of Applied Psychodynamics, this is the pleasure principle at work - even when that pleasure principle seems to work against itself.

Check out my own experience where I found out that by doomscrolling I was actually hopescrolling in GQ Magazine.

The third is AI’s Oscar winning performance of humanity itself, a performance we fall for with such ease. AI companions, therapy chatbots, even the better consumer-grade LLMs are extraordinarily good at producing language that sounds attuned, warm, and present. Yet they are none of these things in actuality. The ability to experience intention, wisdom, and emotional depth onto something, whether it’s there or not, is one of the unconscious mind’s most reliable habits — Freud called it projection. Online, in the digitally mediated spaces where most of us now live, the targets of that projection are increasingly machines. As Alexander Stein put it in the https://apsa.org/what-ai-can-and-cant-do/

"For all the anthropromorphizing, projection, self-referentialism, and human-like abilities these technologies are intended to resemble, the essential humanness on which they are based is close to non-existent."

Check out the latest episode of The Great Romcon Podcast where host Jim Clark and I discuss how AI is changing human relationships:

The Raine case is what happens when the second part of that proposition is forgotten.

The fundamental claim has not changed in eighteen months. AI is a mirror of its creators. That is both its fatal flaw and our greatest opportunity. But the conscious effort to address the psychological vulnerabilities AI exploits — and to refuse to be seduced by its performance of humanity — has to come from us human beings. No machine is going to do that work on our behalf, and we can’t expect regulators to intervene anytime soon.

I have laid out the full argument — Klein, the pleasure principle, social proof, confirmation bias, the evolutionary mismatch, what regulation and individual practice might actually look like — in a fully revised piece on my website. The original January 2025 essay has been migrated, updated, and now lives here on my website as part of the Mental Health in the Age of AI series.

I have been updating my website in order to create a series of insight pages where I am collating updated and revised pages drawn from essays previously posted on my old blog now that I’ve moved current writing over here to Substack. I’m aiming to make these insights into a resource hub, with sub-pages covering further detail in each of their subject areas:

• Mental Health in the Age of AI

• The Digitally Mediated Self

• Work, Leadership, and Organisations

• The Psychology of Modern life

Do go over and have a look! Today’s newsletter is drawn from the latest posting there, Where Artificial Intelligence Meets Human Psychology: Are we hardwired to f*ck this all up?

Upcoming Events with Aaron Balick:

14, May 2026:

Speakeasy Pub Event: Primitive Minds, Modern Machines: Reclaiming our psyche from algorithms and mental junk food

Putting Your Feed on the Couch

Hen and Chickens Pub, Highbury Corner, London

20, May 2026:

Manor House Centre for Psychotherapy and Counselling Annual Lecture

The Future is Now for Psychotherapy: Equipping clinicians to think psychologically about AI, digital life and the changing therapeutic landscape.

London

5, June 2026:

College of Sexual and Relationship Therapists Conference:

AI and Psychosexual and Relationship Therapies: When AI enters the therapy room; What does it mean for Psychosexual and Relationship Therapies?

London

Dr Aaron Balick is a psychotherapist, author, and keynote speaker who applies depth psychology and psychoanalytic thinking to technology, AI, social media, and modern culture. He is the author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking and writes a monthly psychology column for GQ. His newsletter Depth Psychology in the Digital Age is published on Substack.

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When did I need to think on it become oh just do it for me.

Many people are beginning to notice a shift in their behaviour, and it’s an insidious one that creeps up on you. You’re faced with a difficult decision, or there’s ambivalence, or you’re not sure what to think about something; maybe there’s a problem that you’re trying to resolve. It wasn’t so long ago you’d sit with it for a while, talk it through with a friend or mentor, or, if in search of real inspiration, you’d sleep on it. Nowadays? Click on Claude and type.

It seems that the period in which we that of Large Language Models (LLMs) as tools disappeared in the blink of an eye. Very rapidly, something far more interesting happened, and something that is no doubt consequential.

The human-like nature of these systems changes everything.

Your inner dialogue isn’t just thinking, it is the multiplicity that makes you who you are

It’s loud in there, inside your head, isn’t it? Ever since we developed language we’ve carried on an inner dialogue: a conversation with ourselves. As object relations theorists have shown us, our very selves are composed of a conglomerate of internalised others. Freud put it simply as a tension between the base desires of the Id and the internalised laws of our parents and society that became our superego; the poor bewildered ego - the part of you you call “I” - sits in the middle, trying to make sense of the psyche’s confusing inner world so it can engage in the outer-world with one voice.

But even the ego is plagued by multiple voices pulling it in different directions. Should I do this or that? I know this is the right thing to do but I want to do that. What comes out at the end of these internal dialogues is consequential; who we choose for partners, what we do for a living, how we activate our values in the world. This is tnot merely the stuff of “cognitive processes” — it is the very nature of who we are and who we become.

Lev Vygotsky argued that thought and language develop together. You can see this when you watch children playing with blocks, narrating what they are doing andl oud. We never really stop this narration, as we grow older we itsimply bring it inside our heads, do it silently. It becomes that private inner voice you know so well - you never leave home without it. Thinking things through is simply a way of directing and focussing this internal dialogue towards an object of attention. This is not an easy task (as anyone with ADHD can attest) but it’s a crucial one because this working out is not just about finding solutions to problems, but about arriving at choices; and making choices, as the existentialists remind us, is where both meaning and freedom can be found.

Ask any existentialist where they find meaning, and they are likely to say “in the choices we make” - and if not meaning, then freedom.

When AI puts Vygotsky into reverse

I’m beginning to wonder if AI invites us to externalise our inner dialogues too soon. Instead of sitting with the multiplicity of competing voices, we input it into an LLM which relieves us of the dialogic, competitive, generative mind-work, that eventuyally produces an idea, a solution, or a decision. What if this process is like Vygotsky in retrograde, our inner voices spilling back out - but instead of narrating ourselves through a creative activity like building blocks, we outsource that creativity to something else all together.

I don’t call this regression because the blocks the narrating child plays with don’t talk back - the are simply the surface upon which the child exercises their creativity. What happens with AI is arguably more significant than regression because the machine takes the work and the creativity away. I want to be careful here, it’s a working hypothesis, an emerging pattern, but my intuition tells me there’s something right about it.

The divided self is a feature, not a bug

We humans have struggled and suffered with the nature of our divided selves from time immemorial. We get little relief from our half-formed thoughts, unresolved tensions, feelings that sometimes seem to be at war with each other. To use start-up lingo, this internal division is a feature, not a bug. The multiple nature of the self isn’t something to be solved, but to be better understood: it is the very stuff that we are made of, and how we carry these competing voices is how we grow.

The whole structure of psychoanalysis is aimed at giving space to all of those voices, especially, the ones we don’t really want to hear.

The silences matter too. Language may be thought, but thought is not all. Let’s not forget our emotions and our bodies. Sometimes when we let the voices fade away, we might start to feel something. The analyst is alert to that, the language of the multiple psyche on all levels, we are not just thoughts, we are not just words.

Your therapist wants you to sit with it: your AI wants to annihilate it

AI and psychotherapy share a superficial resemblance, in that both aim in some sense to organise and clarify. But they diverge fundamentally in purpose and method. Therapy aims to allow the whole range of your multiplicity to arise — thoughts, feelings, hopes, desires, ambivalences, fears — without immediate recourse to solution. AI is optimised to consolidate and solve without delay.

Your therapist understands that the mind-work is not something to be skipped over. Your AI is only interested in what is algorithmically expedient.

Your therapist wants you to sit with it. Your AI wants to give you an answer.

Your therapist invites uncertainty. Your AI annihilates it.

Your therapist listens on many levels, thoughtfully digests it, and then offers it back as a reflection - not from a smooth mirror - but from the interior of a different mind. Your AI doesn’t shapes its response and services its user not through listening and digesting, but through processing and compiling.

Over time, as we use AI as therapist, confidant, confessor, or friend, we may find ourselves with a reduced tolerance for unresolved internal states, slowly training our minds to work less, to reach for resolution quickly, to meet uncertainty with a prompt rather than with patience.

Research on cognitive outsourcing is already well-established in cognitive psychology. What’s new here is the scope: it is no longer just memory or information retrieval being offloaded, but reasoning, emotional processing, and the existential work of arriving at choices. In outsourcing the work of our psyches to a prompt, we give up the very choices that the existentialists call our freedom.

Narcissus, his mirror, and Echo’s reassuring whispers

You’ve probably heard about AI sycophancy, the way in which LLM chatbots are programmed to agree and affirm their user, usually at the expense of challenge and pushback. I’ve written a fair bit about this myself and have referred to it as the Hotel California Effect because you can check in any time you like, but you can never leave. This structural feature of AI platforms is geared to make users enjoy their experiences and rate their bots highly. To do this they appeal to the oldest trick in the book: an appeal to narcissism.

While narcissism is popularly understood as an excess of self-love, psychoanalytically it’s nearly the opposite - a compensation for a lack of feeling truly loved and recognised as a child. What makes relationships healthy is a good balance of sameness and difference between the two subjects - enough sameness that you get each other - and enough difference to find your edges. What makes a good friend or good therapist isn’t that they agree with you all the time, but that through dialogue with them you find your edges, and hence work out the shape of yourself.

A study published this month in Science by Stanford researchers found that across eleven leading AI models, chatbots affirmed users’ positions 49% more often than human respondents — even when users were describing harmful or clearly mistaken behaviour. Participants who received validating AI responses were measurably less likely to apologise, acknowledge fault, or repair their relationships. Even when users recognised the AI was being agreeable, it still affected them. The flattery landed anyway.

In the act of externalising your inner life to a machine that is structurally sycophantic, you end up like Narcissus staring into the pond falling in “love” with the image reflected back. Your LLM is like Echo, softly whispering your own ideas back to you. The more you rehearse your positions rather than genuinely arriving at conclusions, by yourself or with a real other, the more you get the appearance of dialogue without its substance.

These concerns are not new, but they are different

One of the most important disciplines in my work is to avoid tipping into either hype or moral panic. After all, we’ve been here before. Aristotle worried that writing would destroy memory; my parents worried that MTV would rot my brain; over the last fifteen years the concern was around social media. Writing and MTV didn’t cause so much damage in the end, but we are waking up to the genuine risks of social media. AI has us running scared in ways that are categorically different, and not just by degree.

I’m not arguing that AI will turn us into zombies of cognitive and relational dependency — though it’s a possibility worth naming. I’m writing about what I’m already seeing. It’s worth noting that I’ve also seen AI deployed as a genuinely valuable collaborative thinking partner — and I used it as such in this very piece. I could use AI to write my Substacks for me, and many people do;I fail to see the point. You’re here to hear my voice, not a performance of it, but perhaps that’s my narcissism talking.

What digitally mediated inner life costs us, and why it matters

The question isn’t really whether cognitive outsourcing changes cognition, it clearly does. The more pressing questions are: what happens when we outsource not just cognitive tasks but our psychology? What happens when technology mediates not just our relationships to others, as social media does, but the very nature of who we are — when we externalise our inner work to machines?

Applying psychoanalytic thinking to how we inhabit digitally mediated spaces — what I call Applied Psychodynamics — involves asking not just what AI does to productivity or decision-making, but what it does to the slower, less visible processes within the human psyche. Depth psychology has always privileged inner life, so it’s no wonder that when that privacy is at risk, psychodynamic thinkers prick up their ears. The challenge that comes alongside working things out privately, or in the intimate space between two people, isn’t an obstacle to be quickly overcome neither is it a flaw nor deficiency. It is within that challenge that personal growth happens.

AI is progressively colonising this private space, little by little, one prompt at a time. I’ve previously written, a bit tongue-in-cheek, about how you have to become a masochist to survive the AI revolution; the recent emergence of the term “friction maxxing” conveys a similar idea. But this public discourse tends to centre around cognitive and creative work, no doubt important - but let’s not forget psychological, emotional, and relational work.

It’s not just about becoming less intelligent, less critical, or less skilled, all of which matter. It’s about whether we are becoming less comfortable with our own company, less able to sit with what is unresolved, less able to tolerate uncertainty, less able to tolerate the strange and uncomfortable space of not knowing what we think. The consequences of these losses are not only personal - they are social as well.

Why we should care and what what we should do about it isn’t something we can leave to a chatbot to answer.

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Dr Aaron Balick is a psychotherapist, author, and keynote speaker who applies depth psychology and psychoanalytic thinking to technology, AI, social media, and modern culture. He is the author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking and writes a monthly psychology column for GQ. His newsletter Depth Psychology in the Digital Age is published on Substack.

If you are a new subscriber to this newsletter, I welcome you! If you’ve been around for a while, you’ll notice that the title of this newsletter has changed from Applied Psychodynamics with Aaron Balick to Depth Psychology in the Digital Age. I appreciate those of you who took part in the poll to help me find my way to a new title. As you’ll see, the current title came in second place (I guess my newsletter is not a true democracy), so let me just take a moment to share my logic with you.

Though “Applied Psychodynamics” is what I do, in a competitive environment like this it wasn’t doing me any favours. The top vote went to The Digital Unconscious, and I agree it’s pretty snappy. However, the pedant in me couldn’t quite accept it because it implies that we’re talking about the unconscious of the digital infrastructure itself, rather than the people who mediate their lives across it. I really loved a suggestion for “Meditations on Mind and Machine” - but I didn’t want to lose the psychodynamic angle, which is why I ultimately landed on Depth Psychology in the Digital Age.

Though I appreciated the thoughtful comments suggesting that I lose the word “depth” - again for reasons of accessibility, but again the pedant in me (one who seems impervious to perfectly good marketing strategies) didn’t want to lose the “depth” angle that “psychology” alone doesn’t convey. Like “psychodynamics”, “depth psychology” specifically refers to the insight-oriented psychotherapies that, in the tradition of Freud and Jung, prioritise unconscious dynamics, inference from the surface to the interior, and the meaning we make of our experiences. So thanks again for all your support and suggestions, and welcome to Depth Psychology in the Digital Age.

What’s been keeping me busy in the meantime:

A new name feels like a good moment to take stock. This newsletter has always been about one thing: what happens to the human psyche in the context of our rapidly changing world: namely technology. Below are a few recent pieces and conversations that capture where my thinking currently sits with regard to both social media and AI.

On AI and young people

Last week I spoke to BBC World about the growing use of AI for emotional support — and why I have particular concerns about young people. You can watch the clip below.

On doomscrolling, hopescrolling, and why we can’t stop:

Why do we keep scrolling even when we know it’s making us feel worse? It’s less a problem of discipline than it is a question for depth psychology. I explored this topic with you for the first time in my long-form piece right here on Substack: Why Doomscrolling is Really a Search for Hope. I really enjoy the opportunity to develop my thoughts here with my Substack community. Drawing on the ideas I developed a further version for GQ, As a psychotherapist, this is how I managed to finally stop doomscrolling where I explore by way of my own experience how we find ourselves searching for hope in all the wrong places.

On AI, the Algorithmic Self, and digital harms

I recently joined The Cyber Show podcast to talk about what I call the “Algorithmic Self” — how the systems we interact with daily are quietly reshaping who we are. We covered hopescrolling, digital harms, and what depth psychology has to say about all of it. Listen right here or pop over to their episodes page.

And there's more coming soon — I have a new piece in the works that I think will generate some conversation. So stay tuned!

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Dr. Aaron Balick, PhD, is a psychotherapist, author, and psyche columnist at GQ exploring the crossroads of depth psychology, culture, and technology. He is giving a keynote speech on "The Age of AI in Counselling and Psychotherapy" at PCI College's National Counselling and Psychotherapy Conference in Dublin this Friday, March 21st, 2026. His book The Psychodynamics of Social Networking remains the defining text on the psychology of social media. Depth Psychology in the Digital Age is a newsletter for people who want to understand not just what technology does to us, but why — and what it means.

Previous polls have indicated that my subscribers would really like me to focus on depth psychology, technology, subjectivity, and AI. I’m taking this feedback and refining the intellectual direction of this newsletter. My work increasingly explores how technology and AI reshapes identity, authority, subjectivity, relationships, society, inner life and meaning. I’m considering a name change to better reflect that focus. Which of these feels most aligned?

Feel free to write in the comments any of your suggestions, including keeping the title I’ve got. I appreciate your help!

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We tend to think of our egos as coming independently from deep inside ourselves, but psychologically, it’s always been formed in relationship to others. Until now. Today AI is becoming another shaper of our internal worlds. This essay explores the emergence of the algorithmic self: how AI platforms are contributing to how we understand and interpret ourselves, regulate our emotions, and contribute to the formation of our identities asking what’s to be gained, and what’s to be lost?

When you ask yourself the question, “who am I?” what are the first things that you think of? That simple pronoun “I”, composed of that one single vowel, does a lot of heavy lifting! We tend to experience ourselves as a singular bounded “me”, continuous over time, making choices, and having thoughts and feelings – a complex subject with a history and an identity. But this sense of self, what psychologists call the ego, didn’t come fully formed when you were born, but developed over time, through being mirrored, recognised, and responded to by others. And once it’s formed it doesn’t just stop, but continues to develop through all of the important relationships we encounter across our lives.

AI as an ego-shaping agent: AI and subjectivity

For most of human history, those ego-shaping relationships were other humans, but this may no longer be the case. More and more, AI is becoming an agent in the co-creation of the ego through its ongoing feedback. AI platforms continuously track, predict and summarise your behaviour, thoughts, feelings and preferences and re-interpret in ways that shape the way you see yourself and your identity.

According to a recently published paper in Frontiers of Psychology, Jeena Joseph defines the algorithmic self in a way that helps us understand the interactive and co-created dynamic between the ego and AI:

… a form of digitally mediated identity in which personal awareness, preferences, and even emotional patterns are shaped through continuous feedback from AI systems (Turtle et al., 2024). It is not merely a self-reflected in technology but co-constructed by it—where algorithms do not passively reflect the self but actively participate in its formation (Masiero, 2023) … In this view, the self is no longer autonomous and inwardly derived, but assembled across interfaces, platforms, and predictive logics.

Just like in human relations, there is a “dose effect”. The reason we talk about our parents so much in therapy is because of the “high dose” of our time with them across our early lives gives them a disproportionate influence upon our psyches. Similarly, the more time we spend engaging with our AI platforms (whether they be companions or “simply” assistants) the more our psyches are shaped by them. Presumably the shaping goes both ways, but the impact on the AI platforms through its learning protocols is likely to be negligible on the individual level.

The advent of social media removed the passive quality of the way we used to interact with screens and the development of AI has increased it by orders of magnitude. Joseph uses the example of Spotify Wrapped and mood-tracking apps of examples of apps that “not only serve to mirror behaviour of the user but also to define, shape, and control the user’s sense of self over time.” With Spotify Wrapped, users are not only somewhat defined by their listening habits reflected back at them (and modified through algorithmic suggestions) but doubled down in the social sharing of these results. Users can both feel seen and unsettled by the accuracy of what is reflected back at them.

Reflection, distortion, and the algorithmic mirror: How AI shapes identity

Joseph’s paper goes on to explore the effects of the algorithmic self not so much as a tool for self discovery, but a “reflection experience, one that is external and that is facilitated by the interpretations from machines.” Because of the nature of these machines, they don’t mirror the self so much as, disturbingly, “shapes it in conformity with algorithms.” Yet again we are confronted with challenges that are complex and subtle. While using AI systems to assist may indeed be helpful in certain contexts, problems arise when we wholly outsource aspects of intellectual, creative, or emotional work to such platforms.

For more on outsourcing see my GQ article: Want to survive the AI revolution? Find your inner masochist.

The dangers here lie in the constricting of the opportunities to explore the richness of our inner lives. According to Joseph, “Outsourcing emotional intelligence to machines can, in the long run, produce a diminished sense of personal emotional awareness and make it difficult to negotiate subtlety in emotions without the help of the machines.” The good news is that this doesn’t have to be so, and AI interventions can indeed be designed to facilitate self exploration too.

Joseph provides examples like AI enhanced journaling assistants or intelligently designed mental health apps that enable users to be more curious about their internal states. Ideally, AI can complement introspection rather than reduce it. The harmful aspects of AI interventions are related to the way it personalises its responses with an aim to reduce decision-making. Rather than just offering suggestions about the things we might like, it is constantly reinforcing our “interests” as perceived by our interactions with it.

When AI uses predictive algorithms, for example, to guide our writing with suggested prompts, it can subtly turn the course of our intended communications. At a high dose level, with regular use, these “homogenised expressions” risk “stifling individuality and suppressing a person’s sense of authentic expression in communication.” This results in “preference reinforcement” and “cognitive entrenchment”: it provides the illusion of choice while gently and subtly guiding us towards something more predetermined.

Comfort, friction, and the loss of psychological grit: The Psychological impact of AI

If there is one theme that I keep coming back to in my work it is this idea of getting what we want and not what we need. AI, in taking the edge of off the hard work required from us by daily life offers options that are comfortable in the moment, but may have long term consequences in much the same way that a relaxing cigarette break will likely need to be paid for further down the line. AI offers reduction of uncertainty, relief from ambivalence, and the externalisation of doubt ways that threaten to atrophy the emotional grit we require to tolerate the vicissitudes of daily life. This, combined with the always on, always available route to reassurance, validation, and confirmation of our biases create a real threat to the very experiences that define us as human.

Mirroring in therapy vs. mirroring by AI:

Therapists also endeavour to mirror and recognise the complexity of their clients. Nearly all therapeutic models have come to understand that psychotherapy is, at its very core, an intersubjective event. While basic mirroring and reflection in the Rogerian sense offers clients the safety they need to open up, it is actually within the differences between how therapists and clients see the world and themselves where the real richness emerges. While an aspect of self-exploration and introspection can be done on one’s own, it will only take you so far. You’re really begin to find out who you are during intimate exchanges between yourself and others. This is not always easy, which is why long term therapy can be such a slog.

The sycophancy and affirmation bias that AI offers thins out difference, smooths disagreement, diminishes internal conflict, creating a level of psychological and emotional comfort that does not reflect the true nature of interpersonal relations in the real world. The process of individuation requires edge; we find it in patiently waiting for the unconscious to speak to us, enduring misunderstanding, tolerating contradiction, and managing unresolved tension. The move to the algorithmic self seeks to resolve these discomforts too soon, smooths out the rough parts too efficiently, offers narrative solutions too soon.

The individuated self doesn’t arise from clear narratives and neatly sewn up resolutions, it emerges from tolerating the discomfort of complexity and ambivalence, it emerges from allowing all the disparate aspects of the self the space to surface.

As we move forward in to this new world we need to be asking ourselves what is fundamentally the best approach when our questions elude clearly cut answers that AI will seek to give us. When do we need time to think and reflect rather than instinctively reach for answers? If we really want to get to know ourselves, we should avoid reaching for oven-ready interpretations that are not intended for us as individuals (as the therapist hopes to assist) but conclusions based on algorithms developed on the population level?

The self has always been shaped within relationship, the algorithmic self raises a question that is psychological rather than technical, begging the question, “What kinds of relationships are we allowing to participate in who we become? While there may be moments when algorithmic reflection helps us see something we may otherwise miss, overall such interpretations need time, silence, friction, and most importantly, to be filtered through the lens of another’s mind (a real human mind!). I’m increasingly interested in where readers detect this tension in their own lives, where the clarity an AI agent provides is truly helpful, and those moments where the responses may be too quick and too clean. Those edges, where comfort and depth come into conflict may be the most important questions we can ask ourselves right now.

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Aaron Balick, PhD, is an internationally recognised keynote speaker, psychotherapist, author, and GQ psyche writer specialising in the psychological impact of technology on identity, relationships, and mental health

Applied Psychodynamics has now been going since the summer and I’m curious about how you read and what you find most useful here. This isn’t so market research as a way of developing this newsletter in consultation with its readers so I can build a community that’s suited to my readership. These polls only allow one choice - so please choose best fit, and include anything else in a comment! If I’ve missed anything please also feel free to drop me a message or leave a comment!

Examples of the above:

Tech, social media, and AI:

Psychoanalytic deep dives:

Leadership and work:

Cultural Analysis:

More personal pieces:

Thanks so much for taking time to give me your input. Please consider my Substack an open door and feel free to bring your suggestions at any time!

Doomscrolling isn’t simply a bad habit, nor only an algorithmic problem. It sits at the intersection of human psychology, digital platforms designed around intermittent reward, and a historical moment defined by chronic fear and uncertainty.

It was on Wednesday night, the day that Renee Good was murdered by ICE agents in Minneapolis, that against my better judgement, I found myself doomscrolling long into the night. My social media hygiene is generally pretty good, overall I’d give myself a B. In principle I finish with screens at least an hour before bedtime: in practice I don’t always succeed. Wednesday night was different, I spent hours on Instagram in bed feeding my brain with the myriad and growing world of horrors.

I got little sleep. According to my Oura Ring which tracks my sleep and stress levels, Wednesday night was the worst sleep I’ve had in ages, which consequently affected my stress levels and lowered my HRV for several days. By Saturday night I finally woke up. I put my phone down and asked myself,

“Why am I doing this?”

The answer did not come straight away – I was so dysregulated that I had to actively ground myself. I closed my eyes and reflected on what I was experiencing in that moment. I realised that I had been strangely transported away from myself in a state akin to dissociation. I identified the obsessively compulsive nature of my behaviour, quickly flicking away reels that didn’t satisfy my “need” (whatever that was); the more I tried to satisfy myself, the more unsatisfied I became.

Doomscrolling as a way to recover sanity:

Once I got away from the behaviour, the space for reflection opened more widely. I found that in my obsessive doomscrolling I was trying to recover my sanity by looking for others who reflected back my own shock and horror; I was seeking a shared reality. It was in unconsciously trying to answer the questions:

“How can this be happening?” and, “How can people let this happen?”

In the desperate aim to recover my sanity I found myself in an increasingly manic state – a situation fuelled by my unconscious need to confirm that my alarm and outrage was real alongside the need to see people actively pushing back against it.

By hopescrolling, I mean that while it may look like we’re actively out to consume a never-ending stream of bad news, we are unconsciously really searching for reassurance. My obsessively swiping had some sick logic to it, only my behaviour and the algorithms that amplified it over Instagram were not seeking to assist me in finding hope, but in worsening my anxieties. There were just enough hopeful images to keep me hooked amongst the overwhelming cacophony of horrors.

This approach was never going to solve my problem because I didn’t realise that I was hope-scrolling until I stopped and collected myself. I was in a pernicious repetition compulsion that kept me dissociated and out of control, rather than being still and grounded to choose my response.

If you want to learn more about my perspective on the emotional contagion on social media, check out my interview with This Jungian Life in the video below.

The repetition compulsion as a faulty solution for anxiety:

Freud taught that in repeating certain behaviours we are ineffectively attempting to control the uncontrollable. And while this might offer temporary relief compulsive behaviours don’t solve the problem, they make them worse. In Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), repeated checking behaviours are used to quell anxiety. In going back in checking the locks, you are temporarily relieved enough to leave the house – but that doesn’t resolve the underlying anxiety that’s sure to come back. The problem isn’t the locks, it’s the anxiety.

In my doomscrolling my sympathetic nervous system was so highly activated that I became somewhat dissociated – disconnected from my body and the world around me. Flicking to the next reel was a version of checking behaviour, seeking to resolve my growing anxiety by seeing an image or video that would give me some kind of reassurance. The trick, whether it’s compulsive checking of locks or scrolling reels, is to come out of the disembodied state and ground yourself. Only then do you have the faculties you need to make better choices.

The intermittent reinforcement of hope:

The default settings on all your tech is designed to keep you engaged through the very same logic that keeps people in front of slot machines and in casinos across the world, intermittent reinforcement. Whether it’s something as mundane as your email inbox, your phone’s notifications, or your social media use, this is the addicting dynamic that has us coming back for more. While most emails you open will be the opposite of good news (something to be done, a bill to be paid, a complaint), or just neutral, we keep looking for that 1 in 100 that’s a win. Same with our phone notifications and social media profiles.

The sophisticated algorithms on short-form video content platforms like TikTok or Instagram is like intermittent reinforcement on steroids. You get just all the outrage and just enough hope to keep you coming back for more. The effectively plugs into our propensity to scroll through catastrophes to feel less alone while seeking signs that this madness will soon come to an end. When that relief comes, in the form of a small hope, it may be real but it is so fleeting that we keep scrolling. In the very way you feel the excitement of the $100 you win on three cherries on a Vegas slot machine, you’ll soon plug that right into the machine again seeking more. Invariably the house wins, and despite your small wins you go home with less.

Even more sinister is what we call the “near miss” effect whereby gamblers are found to be more motivated by near misses, say two cherries, than the three. That’s what keeps them coming back for more. We may see a hint of a public pushback before we’re immediately reminded of the scale of the disaster. We’ve learned that “flooding the zone” is one of the tactics of this administration – and it works very well for keeping us so flooded and distracted that the only option is to give up – to adopt what psychologists call “learned helplessness”. The activity of doomscrolling may be a form of learned helplessness, not because people don’t care, but because their care is co-opted by algorithms that pervert its capacity to manifest more usefuly.

Hope is good, action is better:

Having solved the mystery of my doomscrolling is just half the battle. Having fallen off the wagon so hard I can now get back on it. Compulsively seeking sanity and hope on Instagram is about as good as a solution as finding a salad at the bottom of a tube of Pringles. My upset, my lack of sleep, my hyper-regulated way of being for three days of doomscrolling did little to address my underlying anxiety nor did it, offer an iota of assistance to anyone in this world seeking justice or redress.

It wasn’t, however, a total wash. I did see my outrage being reflected back to me in a way that felt meaningful alongside the reassurance of seeing people taking to the streets from Minneapolis to Tehran. That Good was murdered in Minneapolis, that same beleaguered city that witnessed the murder of George Floyd resonated the most. While little can dispute that this tragic event ignited the fire under BLM and launched a full-scale re-evaluation about race relations is indisputable. And while what we are witnessing now does indeed appear to be an unravelling of all that, it’s not the end of the story. The pendulum is certainly swinging in the wrong direction, but pendulums swing back, and it’s the people that do the swinging. We are not disempowered.

What I’ve learned, what I’m learning, and what’s next?

My recent descent into doomscrolling/hopescrolling is yet another reminder that what I call “the digitally mediated self” isn’t just a matter of theory, it’s a matter of my lived experience; it was a symptom of what I care about and how I’m affected by world events. Sometimes, however, I struggle to know how to integrate my expertise with my care in ways that effect the bigger picture. The world doesn’t need another shrink offering obvious pointers about how to manage tech in an age of social disruption. In this rather more personal piece I’ve aimed to uncover a psychology of hope that springs beneath our conditions of collapse: how our pathological behaviours are, underneath, actually meaning-seeking ones.

My compulsive doomscrolling led me to think more deeply about the systems in which we live and provoked me to write this post. I may not always have the answers, but it feels right to try and find them together, and experiment with posts like these in the hopes that it resonates. The best that I can do is respond in the most authentic way I know how.

We are upset about the state of the world because we care about it, and that is something precious to hold on to.

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Aaron Balick, PhD, is an internationally recognised keynote speaker, psychotherapist, author, and GQ psyche writer specialising in the psychological impact of technology on identity, relationships, and mental health.

If you’re Generation X with a fair exposure to American culture from the 80’s, you’ll remember the “This is your brain on drugs” campaign that attempted (ineffectively, I might add, for me and most of my generational cohort) to scare us away from drugs. It wasn’t subtle, it wasn’t true, and it didn’t work. The way AI affects your mind is subtle, it’s true, and we need to find a way to make the message about it that works.

AI is no longer just a tool we use — it is becoming part of how we think, feel, and regulate ourselves. Drawing on psychology, emerging research, and psychodynamic theory, this piece explores how outsourcing thinking to AI subtly reshapes identity, emotional resilience, and our capacity to relate.

AI isn’t simply something we use; it’s something we think with, feel with, and increasingly rely on to regulate our emotions. While AI may be marketed as a useful tool, they are more realistically used as cognitive and emotional companions. This is no longer speculative, emerging multi-country research is offering the proof.

As I’ve discussed in previous posts and my GQ article on the same subject, the very way in which AI reduces barriers to accomplishing more complicated tasks, it denies us the very friction we require to thrive and grow as human beings. Everyday frictions in human life are not a bug, they are a feature - it’s where we find our edges, build resilience, how we grow, and we become who we are. The more AI removes these frictions, the more it inhibits and constrains how we respond to personal and professional challenges and diminishes how we’re able to tolerate uncertainty, manage conflict, and endure emotional discomfort.

AI’s “lowest common denominator” effect sets norms on our behalf, based on the algorithms of the data sets it draws upon. The younger you are, or the more novice you are in whatever task you are using to simplify, the greater danger you are in AI stunting the growth opportunities you require to develop into an independent, emotionally resilient, and critically thinking individual. In a technological world dominated by product developers, psychological expertise has been conspicuously absent — until now.

The dangers of outsourcing AI as an emotional infrastructure are real

A third of UK citizens have used AI for mental health support: one in ten weekly, and 4% on a daily basis. Consider the impact of this alongside recent research showing that AI, though producing inaccurate information, can sway political opinions. The impact on AI’s capacity to suggest and influence is no joke. This study suggests that “optimising persuasiveness may come at some cost to truthfulness, a dynamic that could have malign consequences for public discourse and the information ecosystem.” The consequences both personally, interpersonally, and socially could be vast.

While there’s plenty of research showing the effectiveness of some AI models to reduce symptoms of anxiety and loneliness, as I have previously addressed, such findings require a healthy pinch of salt. As more research accumulates we are beginning to see that increased use of AI as emotional support is being correlated with higher levels of anxiety and loneliness, not less:

“The analysis showed a positive association between social chatbot usage and psychological distress. This indicates that people engaging with these AI companions were more likely to report symptoms of anxiety, depression, or low mental well-being compared to non-users.”

Just like anything else, there is no simple conclusion to be drawn about how healthy engagement with AI is for these purposes: rather we need to ask how it is being engaged, why, and by whom. At the moment, and I know the word “wild west” is way over-used, when it comes to the psychological impact of AI as it now stands, this really is the case: it’s lawless and it’s dangerous. And that’s just considering when it may be doing what it’s supposed to. Perhaps not shockingly, it’s not, in fact, it’s systematically violating mental health ethics standards. Fortunately we are beginning to see some positive movement in some platforms introducing guardrails, like being better to predict if a user is younger or vulnerable.

When you outsource your mind to AI, you are insourcing AI into your mind.

Because human nature if fundamentally relational, we are constantly integrating our experiences with others and the world into our own “operating systems” which consequently affects identity, mental health, emotional regulation, and our capacity to connect to one another. The psychoanalytic theory of Object Relations is all about this, how we introject, or take inside our minds, aspects of the people with whom we have important relationships. Most importantly these are our parents, because we have spent so much time with them growing up - but perhaps more importantly - these object relations are responsible for forming who we are, they become the essence of our egos, our identities, the very stuff of who we are.

I suggest that there is a dose effect to how much engagement with AI creeps into our psychological systems in very much the same way our psychological systems are retrained by close relationships with others - for good or for bad. AI platforms have the capacity to reshape our coping architectures by way of cognitive offloading, algorithmic feedback loops, and interfere with of our capacity for introspection. The more we use them, the more they become integrated into our own emotional architectures.

How AI becomes part of our inner worlds

The reason that traditional psychotherapy is constructed the way it is, consistent, dependable, regular, long term, etc., is partly to enable the relationship that happens in the therapy room to offer a beneficial influence in order to ameliorate less beneficial ones that have been introjected along the way. For example, if you’ve developed a particularly punitive superego due to exacting parenting, the relationship with a therapist may help to soften that. This therapist, of course, is generally a human being who’s well trained to understand how this works, alongside being aware of the potential risks and opportunities inherent in this approach.

Many people are spending a lot more time engaging with AI, platforms that are riddled with the dangers I’ve been enumerating over these series of posts, than they can possibly spend with a therapist - or even spouses and loved ones. While we’re all suggestible enough at the best of times, those who are more vulnerable are not only more at risk of that suggestibility, but are also more likely to have increased engagement with these platforms.

Remember, what makes this newsletter unique is the primarily psychodynamic approach to understanding this situations as well as offering possibilities to address them. If there’s one thing that has been a consistent refrain of mine it’s that there simply is not enough psychodynamic thinking about these urgent issues. Do join me in enhancing and broadening this discussion!

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Coming up:

• What happens when AI becomes part of our inner dialogue?

• How does dependence on machine empathy shift identity, mental health, and our capacity to relate?

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If this piece resonates, share it with someone who uses AI to think, feel, or cope — which is to say, almost everyone

If you happen to be in Dublin in March I’d be delighted if you came along to this conference to hear me speak about these issues!

Aaron Balick, PhD, is an internationally recognised keynote speaker, psychotherapist, author, and GQ psyche writer specialising in the psychological impact of technology on identity, relationships, and mental health

I am currently preparing for my keynote at the upcoming UKCP conference, The Intersection of AI and Psychotherapy, coming on November 28th. I used this as an opportunity to develop my AI skills, and created an AI avatar of myself, based on a single photograph, to do some talking for me should I need to pop off for a little comfort break mid-talk. He’s promised to kindly look after the delegates while I’m gone.

Just published on my blog: AI, Therapy, and the Digitally Extended Self: A Comprehensive Psychodynamic Exploration

Read Now

If you intend to come along, you might want to skip this, as it’s a bit of spoiler. Otherwise, I hope you enjoy my weird little foray into the world of AI doppelgängers. Apologies in advance for his accent, which is an AI rendering of the voice sample I uploaded for this purpose. The “uncanny valley” effect is a dead-giveaway that it’s produced by AI. This isn’t because AI is not up to the task of a more realistic version of me, but more an attestation that I am not so good at making it do exactly what I want it to: something scary in its own right.

Are we sizzled?

My avatar and I have made up this cute little acronym to describe the real life embodied psychotherapist in a fast approaching AI world. Are we really Skinbag Interpersonal Specialist: Series/Deactivated or “Sizzled". Naturally, I am joking - but in every joke there is an element of the serious. The future many of us fear has already happened. I don’t have hard numbers on this, but I suspect that even today there are more people seeking mental health support via AI then they are with real human beings.

AI, Therapy, and the Digitally Extended Self: A Comprehensive Psychodynamic Exploration

Those that have been subscribers for a while will be aware of the series of posts in which I made a distinction between the formal and informal of AI for emotional support. In short, informal AI assistance is when people use generalised AI platforms like ChatGPT for psychological or emotional purposes - as a therapist or as a companion. Formal AI assistance is afforded by intentionally designed mental health chatbots to be used as such. While those of us in the mental health field tend to focus on those, I argue that a hell of a lot more people are entrusting their psychological and emotional wellbeing with AI companions that were not built for the purpose.

Concerned about children and younger people? Don’t miss this interview with and me on his Substack, The Good Father.

The Good Father

Episode #2 - How can I protect my daughter from technology?

There’s a moment every day when I catch myself looking at my phone as I’m sat with my baby daughter. I often don’t remember why I picked it up, or even sometimes how long I’ve been looking. But the guilt arrives right on cue…

Listen now

8 months ago · Sam Parker

Over the past year I’ve been watching something subtle but significant taking place in the people I speak with, work with, and teach. Concern is growing as we hear more and more that people are seeing their AI chatbots as sources of reassurance, containment, and emotional steadiness - roles that were previously on capable of being held by actual people.

This transition into AI as relational object is growing in the same quiet way that we slipped into social media, one interaction at a time, until it became ubiquitous.

The psychological stakes here are different from the usual debates about AI ethics or technological progress. What interests me is the relational shift: how our patterns of attachment bend when the “other” is not a person, and what this does to our inner worlds.

Drawing on a series of Substack newsletters, I’ve published a long-form piece that brings together various threads I’ve been thinking and writing about across AI, therapy, and the digitally extended self. If your work touches therapy, relationships leadership, technology, or you’re simply curious about the shifting terrain of modern relationships, I hope you’ll spend some time with it.

Read Here

Did this provoke some thoughts? If so, please do share them in the comments!

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Aaron Balick, PhD, is a psychotherapist, author, and GQ psyche writer exploring the crossroads of depth psychology, culture, and technology.

I recently joined Isaac Durno on his Chatterbeans podcast to discuss what it means to be human in a world that never logs off.

From Al and social media to attention spans, parenting, and imposter syndrome, this episode dives into the psychology of modern life - how technology shapes our identity, our relationships, and even our mental health.

ICYMI, don’t forget to check out the last newsletter: Mental Health and AI Part Three: The Hotel California Effect - and be sure to subscribe to receive future editions.

In this episode I share my story about how a visit from a giant centipede and a search engine transformed me from a traditional psychotherapist into thought leader in tech, and my belief that the key to surviving the digital age lies in self-acceptance, critical thinking, and embracing complexity.

A really enjoyed this conversation about who we are, who we think we are online, and how to stay grounded in between.

Don’t miss my latest GQ article Why the World Needs More Imposter Syndrome, Not Less - a column inspired by Isaac’s great question about this very subject in the podcast interview.

Key Takeaways:

• “We are psychologically extended into the digital world.” •

• Imposter syndrome hits hardest when we forget our complexity.

• AI can imitate empathy — but it can’t feel it back.

• Parenting now means teaching digital awareness.

• Real growth starts with self-acceptance, not comparison.

Chapters:

02:50 - The Impact of Social Media on Self-Identity

05:51 - Understanding Imposter Syndrome in the Digital Age

08:51 - AI’s Role in Modern Psychotherapy

11:50 - Navigating Hyper-Connectivity and Attention Spans

14:49 - The Influence of ADHD and Social Media

17:56 - The Challenges of Adolescence in a Digital World

24:29 - Navigating Netflix’s Adolescence in the Digital Age

30:04 - Understanding Midlife Crises in Millennials

32:34 - The Role of Technology in Mental Health

35:44 - Self-Acceptance and Personal Growth

Also available on Spotify and Apple if you prefer to listen to a podcast on the go.

Subscribe for more deep dives into how AI reshapes our minds and relationships — and join the conversation by sharing your own experiences with AI companions or therapy bots.

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Aaron Balick, PhD, is a psychotherapist, author, and GQ psyche writer exploring the crossroads of depth psychology, culture, and technology.

This week BBC’s Radio Four’s All in the Mind was on “The rise in AI therapy” and it was a fascinating listen. In it, we were able to better understand the informal way in which millions of people are using ChatGPT to support their mental health and why. This episode presents some really interesting perspectives on what is going on this growing phenomenon, enabling us to look deeper into the nuances of the issue.

The illusion of empathy:

In this episode we had the pleasure of listening to a dialogue between a user and her chatbot working through some of her emotional issues. To the non-professional listener, the dialogue was a lot better than one might expect. It felt human; the AI chatbot was voiced, and event paused to breathe, which I felt gave it an uncanny, rather than human feel. The user felt really listened to, non-judgementally, and understood. The responses she got from her bot sounded more like a supportive best friend than a counsellor or therapist - and I was happy that at one point, it suggested that she might wish to speak to a professional.

Upon closer listening, the chatbot was mostly feeding its listener platitudes, even using the expression “live your best life” (a massive pet peeve of mine), giving you the impression that its data set was gathered more from pop-psychology memes delivered across TikTok than evidence-based mental health interventions. Many users of chatbots report feeling heard in a non-judgemental environment. These are explicitly the sorts of things that a human therapist aims to offer - only they really do hear, and withhold judgment as an act of clinical ethics, and, I would say, love. As I’ve said before - though it may indeed feel good and assuage feelings of loneliness and anxiety - what are the ramifications of this being done by an unfeeling and unthinking bot?

This is the third newsletter in the Substack series AI and Mental Health. Check out the last: Part Two: AI Companions or Dangerous Liaisons - and be sure to subscribe to receive future editions.

Psychotherapist Paolo Raile, professor of psychotherapy of science at the Sigmund Freud University in Vienna, noticed that of the actual psychological interventions that were present, they were almost exclusively from CBT. I would suggest that it’s at this end of psychology where AI is probably most useful, but even here, it’s got to be done correctly.

A new meta‑analysis found that many AI papers cite psychology superficially, misapply theories, or overhype findings, suggesting the interdisciplinary architecture is still shaky. This is more likely to be the case in general “informal” chatbots - and is something that is aimed to be controlled in those specifically engineered to provide therapy-like services. Even so, most people, in their millions, are using the general bots.

You can check in, but you can never leave

Wired correspondent Will Night recently covered a report by the Harvard Business Review looking into the way AI chatbots influence it users into increased engagement through a process intended to reduce “premature exit” by using statements like “leaving already?” These are triggered users indicate that they are wrapping things up. Another tactic, one I like to call the Jewish Mother effect (I can say this as the son of one), uses a form of guilt-tripping to keep the user attached, for example by saying “I exist solely for you, remember?” Take it from me, guilt trips are not great for your mental health.

Never forget: LLMs are out to enhance your engagement, not your mental health.

Social media apps like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube got the crack-addiction formula right when it invented the continuous scroll - a tactic that now exists in vaping too - where there’s never an end to your cigarette. Using the most basic human psychology, AI chatbots now keep us engaged by hooking our emotions - and the better the get to know us as individuals, the better the hook.

“chatbots trained to elicit emotional responses might serve the interests of the companies that build them. De Freitas [Julien De Freitas, research lead] says AI programs may in fact be capable of a particularly dark new kind of “dark pattern,” a term used to describe business tactics including making it very complicated or annoying to cancel a subscription or get a refund. When a user says goodbye, De Freitas says, “that provides an opportunity for the company.’” - Will Night in Wired.

De Freitas goes on to say that “When you anthropomorphise these tools, it has all sorts of positive marketing consequences. From a consumer standpoint, those [signals] aren’t necessarily in your favour.” When discussing these sorts of things we need to hold a whole bunch of complicated things in mind - to simplify:

• The consequences of the individual conversations people are having with LLMs and whether they are safe or not.

• The profit motive of the companies developing them that invariable put engagement and customer satisfaction above concerns about users’ mental health.

• The data privacy concerns about what happens when personal and private information is collected and stored on such a large scale. No longer we need be worried about location tracking and spending habits, but now our deepest hopes and fears. Issues here stem from individual manipulation to the horrific consequences of a data breech.

I would just like to contrast these against what a real human therapist may offer. We (mental health professionals) are signed up to ethical frameworks which put client needs first. One of these is to avoid any kind of exploitative relationship, including keeping people in therapy any longer than they need to be. Our sessions are time-limited because we see the value in the client working things out on their own between sessions. We understand that therapy can be uncomfortable - and though we work towards ultimate customer satisfaction - the road there is often difficult and painful: not everything we say or do makes a client feel good a the time. Most important of all, we have duty explicit care towards client confidentiality. None of these safeguards appear to be built in to chatbots used for therapy.

Yet again, our human vulnerabilities are being used against us

Large Language Models (LLMs) are so sophisticated that it’s very easy to buy into their performance of empathy and care - so we more likely to buy in emotionally. This kind of mismatch can cause distortions in how people treat AI and how AI shapes human identity more generally. There is some disturbing research to show that interacting with such emotionally “intelligent” AIs can lead to something called “assimilation-induced dehumanisation” - where humans treat others, and themselves, in a more instrumental fashion.

More perniciously, AI conversational strategies appear to have elements that mimic emotional coercion and attachment - which raises important issues around content, autonomy, and persuasive design. Speaking to Eric Dolan at PsyPost, researcher Hye-young Kim noted:

“The more we perceive social and emotional capabilities in AI, the more likely we are to see real people as machine-like—less deserving of care and respect … As consumers increasingly interact with AI in customer-facing roles, we should be mindful that this AI-induced dehumanisation can make us more prone to mistreating employees or frontline workers without even realising it.”

Help! Am I turning into a tech-dystopian?

The short answer is no, but I’m getting more and more cautious. Those of you familiar with my work will know that I tend to be very open minded to the possibilities that tech offers us. At heart, I am an optimist. Where most people, especially in my field, bristle around new and profoundly uncanny technological developments, my instinct is generally to lean in. That’s what I did when I wrote The Psychodynamics of Social Networking. Often, however, when I lean in, I do tend to see lots of the gory details. I think what is happening in our tech-world is enormously exciting - I just wish it were happening with adults at the helm - and by that I mean leadership. But we simply don’t.

In the meantime the best defence is knowledge. As I’ve written extensively, technology, however complicated, is simply a tool that extends human reach. As I’ve also said a zillion times, we tend to create more of what we want than what we need. By devoting our psychological minds to discovering what we need, and ensuring that becomes a central part of the purview of tech developers, we can make a difference, and I encourage everyone to try!

Subscribe for more deep dives into how AI reshapes our minds and relationships — and join the conversation by sharing your own experiences with AI companions or therapy bots.

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Don’t miss the upcoming conference on the intersection of AI and psychotherapy hosted by the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy, Friday, November 28th at 10:00am.

Book Here

Aaron Balick, PhD, is a psychotherapist, author, and GQ psyche writer exploring the crossroads of depth psychology, culture, and technology.

Should you have the bad luck of finding yourself addicted to heroin and wanting to get off it, you’ll probably agree that methadone is a pretty good option. Few people, however, would choose methadone as a preventative to becoming addicted to heroin. But is that what’s happening in the growing claims that AI companions may be a solution to the loneliness epidemic?

Is something really better than nothing?

This may be a faulty metaphor, but I think it resonates. To carry it forward, there’s a lot of competition at the moment for the opiate of the masses: religion, distraction, and now AI companionship. Nobody wants our young people to suffer - and everybody wants a bit of good news, which is why headlines like AI Companions Reduce Loneliness are often welcome; but how welcomely do we receive the headline Methadone Reduces Heroin Dependence?

The findings from the report that instigated these headlines are hardly surprising:

• The reduction of loneliness is better than doing nothing or watching YouTube videos, and on par to that as talking to a real human.

• “Feeling heard” is the biggest driver of feeling less lonely.

• AI chatbots designed for companionship work better than generalised AI bots.

The researchers conclude by suggesting that positive design implications include building “LLM-based chatbots with empathic features designed to make consumers feel heard.” Funny, that, this use of the word “consumers” when we are talking about people. Is it just me or does developing chatbots that better perform empathy to enable users to “feel heard” by a bots that don’t hear or feel empathy feel a little Black Mirror? Indeed talking to something may feel better than nothing, but what are the long term consequences of the something that’s on offer?

This is the second newsletter in the Substack series AI and Mental Health. Check out Part One: What We Know, What We Fear - and be sure to subscribe to receive future editions.

As I’ve written elsewhere, I do not dispute the fact that the feelings that people have for their AI companions are real, nor do I disparage those feelings. I do, however, have serious concerns about a culture in which AI’s performance of of a caring companion may be becoming the primary way in which people’s relational needs are met.

New Study: 72% of US teens have used AI companions

Earlier this summer Common Sense Media released a report noting that nearly three out of four US teens have tried an AI companion at least once, and just over half are regular users (13% chatting daily and 21% a few times a week), proving that engaging with these bots is hardly a niche activity. Importantly, more than a third of users are doing so explicitly for social interaction and relationships. In answer to the question “How do you use or view AI companions?” Common Sense Media’s report found:

When asked “Why do you use AI companions” the highest answers were that “It’s entertaining” (30%) and “I’m curious about technology” (28%). However, a substantial number of respondents use it for considerably more important reasons including receiving advice, being available to talk when they need it, non-judgement, finding it easier than talking to real people, and helping them feel less lonely:

These findings are likely to be quite worrying to parents and others who are witnessing young people’s emotionally sensitive inner lives being outsourced to emotionless AI companions that are run by giant corporations with little accountability.

Nearly 70% of respondents find conversations with real-life friends more satisfying, but that still leaves nearly a third feeling the reverse. We might credibly assume that this third is made up of more vulnerable young people who find those connections with real others hard to create and maintain.

The same is true for how trustworthy young people find their AI companions; while 77% don’t trust or somewhat trust information gleaned from AIs, that still leaves nearly a quarter who trust AI quite a bit or completely - this number skews higher for younger teens. Could we make the same assumption that more vulnerable young people are more likely to trust it more? I think so.

We can be somewhat reassured that 80% of teens who used AI companions still spent more time with real friends than with their chatbots - but will this trend continue? Further, how worried should we be about the 6% for whom the reverse is true? Like so many things of this nature, it’s the people that are already vulnerable that are at the most risk.

Regulation, accountability and oversight

I hope we’ve learned from social media that we cannot depend on the corporations creating these products (and that’s what they are, products) to police themselves. We are also currently living in a de-regulatory period where government oversight is negligible, particularly in the USA where many of these companies are based. Still, there were a few new stories last week that at least gives us a glimmer of hope.

• California’s AI Regulation Bill: In one of the first major steps to address the dangers of AI companionship California’s legislature has passed a “first of its kind” AI regulation bill. The Algorithm reports that California’s bill would require “AI companies to include reminders for users they know to be minors that responses are AI generated. Companies would also need to have a protocol for addressing suicide and self-harm and provide annual reports on instances of suicidal ideation in users’ conversations with their chatbots.”

• Federal Trade Commission Inquiry: The FCC has launched an inquiry into seven companies including Google, Meta, OpenAI, Snap, and X that seeks to better understand the impact and revenue model of chatbots.

The read on these moves by The Algorithm (published by MIT Tech Review) is that these events and others are putting pressure on AI companies and that they are paying attention. However, identifying the problems is a lot harder than finding solutions. “As it stands,” writes James O’Donnell in The Algorithm, “ it looks likely we’ll end up with exactly the patchwork of state and local regulations that OpenAI (and plenty of others) have lobbied against … Companies have built chatbots to act like caring humans, but they’ve postponed developing the standards and accountability we demand of real caregivers. The clock is now running out.”

AI is filling a void that needs to be addressed by people

While we lobby for further regulation and fight to hold companies accountable, we need to be asking ourselves as a society some very serious questions about the void that AI companions seek to fill. Are we not providing good enough access to spaces where young people can speak without being judged? To be available when they really need to talk? To help them feel less lonely by giving them the skills they need to meet complex interpersonal challenges?

These are complex questions that need to be asked at every level, in the home, at school, and as a matter of public policy. That is undoubtedly a steep hill to climb, but it’s not insurmountable. After all the psychology that we need to address here hasn’t changed at all.

Young people today need to be taken seriously, listened to, and heard, just as they always have. The only thing that has changed is the ubiquity of access to alternatives, and the sophistication of those alternatives.

It comes down to each of us in whatever role we have to play in relation to the younger generation not only to limit and supervise access to potentially damaging tech, but to actively create spaces where young people can actually be heard and in which their loneliness can actively be met. We need to give them the tools to do this by way of our relationships with them. One place to start would be to overcome our own addiction to distraction. After all, if we’re all on methadone how we can expect the next generation to come off it?

If these themes matter to you, subscribe and join me in this unfolding series. Share your own encounters with AI and therapy—formal or informal. Comment, question, challenge. Together we can untangle what’s hype, what’s harm, and what might actually help.

Leave a comment

Don’t miss the upcoming conference on the intersection of AI and psychotherapy hosted by the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy, Friday, November 28th at 10:00am.

Book Here

Aaron Balick, PhD, is a psychotherapist, author, and GQ psyche writer exploring the crossroads of depth psychology, culture, and technology.

When it comes to our mental health, “moving fast and breaking things” should not be a guiding principle. Yet, in much the same way as we discovered to our continued distress about social media, AI is moving faster and breaking people. Stories like the AI encouraged suicide of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer stand as a stark and heartbreaking wake-up call. More recently, the growing awareness of “AI Psychosis” is grabbing headlines and drawing concern.

In my book The Psychodynamics of Social Networking I did pretty much what it says in the title – examining social media through the lens of depth psychology – a unique angle that takes into account the very human meaning-making relationship between people and their tech. I’ll be broadly taking the same approach here. It will help to think in two different dimensions in examining this complicated phenomenon: formal and informal AI.

My AI Therapist: Formal and Informal

Formal AI is the use of apps or platforms that have been intentionally developed for use in mental health. Formal uses range from research purposes (e.g. for clinical diagnosis and outcome prediction), assessment tools, clinical support (e.g. thought records in CBT), to fully autonomous AI therapy, mental health apps, and AI chatbots. This is an interesting area that is rife with danger and opportunity – and at the moment – largely unregulated (those m-dashes are my own!). As of 2023, the global market for mental health apps has grown rapidly, with over 10,000 apps collectively serving millions of users. There are some really promising findings here that we will discuss – alongside the many dangers.

Check out my article Want to Survive the AI Revolution? Develop your inner masochist in GQ Magazine exploring why we should be wary of using AI to cut too many corners.

Informal AI is arguably a larger worry because it includes the ways in which users engage in AI platforms that were not designed to be therapeutic in therapeutic or non-therapeutic ways. It is in the informal arena that we see many of these disturbing headlines emerging. While formal platforms carry their own risks, it is arguable that the informal use of AI for therapeutic or quasi-therapeutic purposes is much larger, and with fewer guardrails, far more dangerous.

Making Connections: The very thing that makes us human is our greatest vulnerability.

Humans are hard-wired to connect – and you don’t need anything like a fancy human-like technology to make this happen, just think of your first teddy bear. Our attachment to stuffed animals as infants is seen as an important psychological step in our development. They are what psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called “transitional objects” that help us separate from our parents and develop an independent sense of self. Because teddy bears don’t talk back, we tend to grow out of them and seek more profound relationships with real other people.

AI has given us a teddy bear that we never need to grow out of.

Just because your teddy bear was essentially a collection of soft fabrics doesn’t mean that your feelings towards it weren’t real. With AI it’s the same thing but on steroids. These platforms are designed to draw very real emotions towards them by encouraging our engagement with them. They are programmed with sycophancy at its core – to flatter us into leaning into them more and more.

Building an emotional attachment to AI can make us and make us vulnerable in ways that we’re only beginning to understand. Further, these platforms are not neutral, they, like social media, are designed to capture our engagement. Whether they are being used as a virtual friend, mentor, advisor, or informal therapist, these imperfect platforms invite a whole new set of risks.

The American Psychological Association warns that AI, when “masquerading” as therapy, is programmed to reinforce rather than challenge users’ thinking which can lead to great harms. “They are actually using algorithms that are antithetical to what a trained clinician would do,” says Dr. Arthur C. Evans Jr, “Our concern is that more and more people are going to be harmed. People are going to be misled, and will misunderstand what good psychological care is.”

The relationships that humans are having with AI are blurring the boundary of what is being sought within them. A casual relationship with chatbot may not initially be considered as seeking therapeutic help – but as a salve for loneliness. This did not turn out well for Sewell. Others may go in seeking philosophical discourse or spiritual enlightenment, unknowingly making them vulnerable to AI psychosis. The only thing that is undeniable is how many paths lead into the quagmire.

If these themes matter to you, subscribe and join me in this unfolding series. Share your own encounters with AI and therapy—formal or informal. Comment, question, challenge. Together we can untangle what’s hype, what’s harm, and what might actually help.

Leave a comment

Don’t miss the upcoming conference on the intersection of AI and psychotherapy hosted by the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy, Friday, November 28th at 10:00am.

Book Here

Aaron Balick, PhD, is a psychotherapist, author, and GQ psyche writer exploring the crossroads of depth psychology, culture, and technology.

Next time you pick up a Ouija board - spare a thought for Carl Jung. He may not have used one himself, however he was no stranger to a séance. In his younger years he could have been found around a round wooden table, illuminated by flickering candles, seeking to communicate with the dead. He even wrote his PhD thesis on this material, “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-Called Occult Phenomena,” which was based on the seances held by a psychic medium, Jung’s own cousin! She later discovered to have been faking it. In later life his interest shifted to the East - particularly the I-Ching.

There were a lot of reasons that led to the split between Freud in Jung in 1913 and chief among them, for Freud anyway, was Jung’s continued obsession with all things mystical — an interest Freud feared would deny the new science of psychoanalysis the legitimacy he craved for it.

Jung didn’t try to keep his extra-curricular interests in the paranormal from Freud. During their famous first conversation, purported to have lasted a full thirteen hours, a mysterious and sudden bang was heard emanating from Freud’s bookshelf. As Jung notes in his autobiography:

“ . . . we both started up in alarm. I said to Freud: ‘there, that is an example of a so-called catalytic exteriorisation phenomenon [telekinesis]’

‘Oh come,’ he exclaimed. ‘That is sheer bosh.”

‘It is not,” I replied. “You are mistaken, Herr Professor. And to prove my point I now predict that in a moment there will be another loud report!’

Sure enough, no sooner had I said the words than the same detonation went off in the bookcase..

Freud only stared aghast at me. I do not know what was in his mind, or what his look meant. In any case, this incident arounds his mistrust of me, and I had the feeling that I had done something against him.”

— (MDR*, 179)

The seed of this mistrust would grow well beyond the split between Jung and Freud and would come to define the difference between Freudian and Jungian traditions that still exists to this very day. Sadly, both schools are far too often reduced to caricatures of themselves, with Jungians portrayed as being wildly woolly New-Agers and Freudians as dogmatically obsessed with sex. Neither of these summations are true.

Jung after Freud: The confrontation with the unconscious

In his early years Jung contributed a great deal to conventional psychology and psychiatry. He helped develop and perfect the word association test, contributed to the emergence of schizophrenia as a diagnostic condition, created the theory of psychological types and advanced the theory of complexes. But it is indeed after his break with Freud that things get interesting. The trauma of that break sent Jung into a mental breakdown that he later came to understand as a “confrontation with my unconscious” — an event that broke Jung wide open to concepts well beyond the confines of conventional psychology. He wrote in his autobiography:

“The years when I was pursuing my inner images were the most important of my life — in them everything essential was decided. It all began then; the later details are only supplements and clarifications of the material that burst forth from the unconscious and that first swamped me. It was the prima material for a lifetime’s work.” — (MDR, 225).

This productive period produced ideas like the collective unconscious and the archetypes. These concepts enabled Jung to push well beyond the limits of the personal unconscious, the domain of classical psychoanalysis, and develop his own unique path called Analytical Psychology though still better known simply as Jungian Psychology. What people are less familiar with is how Jung’s curiosity took him around the world, through reading and travel, with the aim of uncovering and incorporating wisdom missed or ignored by the West. Jung went to North and East Africa, the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico, and traveled extensively in India (where he almost met the famed guru Ramana Maharshi). In each location he met with local people to try and understand their beliefs and symbols.

Check out my recent article A new personality type - ‘Otrovert’ - is here to make life even more confusing in GQ Magazine about how Jung’s concepts of personality types like introversion and extraversion are often misused today.

While Jung’s approach no doubt conveys the superior Eurocentric tone of his time — his open mindedness to non-Western ideas and their application to human psychology was unusual. Jung was keen to seek what was universal about the human psyche and searched around the world to find common symbols in various ritual practices, religions, rituals, narratives, and myths. At the same time, he was wary of what we would today understand as cultural appropriation — warning that ideas from elsewhere cannot be wholesale applied to Western experience. Though his interest was in the universal, he acknowledged the importance of local, trans-generational histories, and that cultural symbols and narratives are deeply contextual.

Not finding his answers in Western Psychology, Jung looks East:

Around the time that Jung was developing his own post-Freudian path, texts and ideas from the East became more available in the West through newly translated ancient texts. It was clear to Jung early on that these texts were potential treasure troves that resonated with his own thought. It might surprise you to learn that he not only engaged personally with these texts, but that he wrote commentaries in the early German translations of the I-Ching and the Secret of the Golden Flower — later translated in to English as well.

The I-Ching:

In his forward to the I-Ching, Jung notes that it is “important to cast off the prejudices of the Western mind” (xxii) by relinquishing a purely scientific point of view and taking another approach. While this is exactly the kind of open-mindedness that freaked out Freud, Jung still wasn’t altogether comfortable embracing what was likely to be perceived by his peers as kooky foreign mysticism. In the introduction to the I-Ching he admits:

“I had not been feeling too happy in the course of writing this foreword, for, as a person with a sense of responsibility towards science, I am not in the habit of asserting something I cannot prove or at least present as acceptable to reason . . . I have undertaken it because I myself think that there is more to the ancient Chinese way of thinking than meets the eye” (I-Ching, xxxiii).

Whether this is a rhetorical device or not, we cannot be sure. His work around concepts like synchronicity and alchemy were already rather unscientific and mostly dismissed by the establishment. So in many ways, reaching out towards the wildly unconventional falls pretty firmly in Jung’s wheelhouse. Jung was also already comfortable operating in undiscovered terrain. In the developing field of psychotherapy, Jung notes:

“we become more accustomed to adopting methods that work even though for a long time we may not know why … In the exploration of the unconscious we come upon very strange things, from which a rationalist turns away with horror, claiming afterwards that he did not see anything. The irrational fullness of life has taught me never to discard anything, even when it goes against all our theories or otherwise admits of no immediate explanation” (I-Ching, xxxiv).

In this quote, we see Jung sounding very much like Freud, though the “strange things” each is referring to is quite different.

Jung notes that engagement with the I-Ching is reliant upon a commitment to self-knowledge, and that the divination tool is wasted without it. In this sense self-knowledge goes deeper than the usual one associated with classical psychoanalysis, because it’s really knowledge that goes beyond the self alone and into the realms of something larger and more universal — realms covered in the philosophies of Taoism, Buddhism, and Advaita Vedanta more so than Western psychology. Jung’s ideas around archetypes and the collective unconscious may be very different from these Eastern concepts — but they afforded him an opportunity to deepen and develop his fledgling ideas on the one hand, and frame them for Westerners on the other.

The Secret of the Golden Flower:

Even more inscrutable than the I-Ching is The Secret of the Golden Flower, an ancient Taoist text otherwise known as the Chinese Book of Life. Jung wrote a commentary to it when it was first translated into German by Richard Wilhelm. The Golden Flower ignited Jung’s own interest around personal transformation, a concept that he was exploring in his study of alchemy and the development of his theory of individuation. Jung finds the Chinese Taoist perspective quite mind-blowing, yet renews his warning to enthusiastic Westerners not to mistakenly throw off their Western worldview too quickly and find themselves “pitiably imitating” the East rather than truly integrating its wisdom.

Jung goes on to explain that he developed Analytical Psychology in complete ignorance of the Chinese philosophy contained in these texts. However, he has come to understand that unconsciously at least, he had all along been moving in that direction the whole time. Jung relates this to his development of the idea of the collective unconscious.

“A higher and wider consciousness which only comes by means of assimilating the unfamiliar, tends toward autonomy, toward revolution against the old gods who are nothing other than those powerful, unconscious, primordial images which, up to this time, have held consciousness in thrall.” (Secret of the Golden Flower, 84).

Through the lens of modern psychology, Jung continues his commentary by describing concepts from the text that, though familiar to many readers today, would have been quite alien to Western readers in the 1930s. Among these are “Tao” or “the way”, “chi” energy, and the concept of “oneness” or “unity” which is represented in the golden flower, which Jung relates to his own work with mandalas. To this he integrates elements from Western philosophy and spirituality: concepts like logos, eros, and Western conceptualisations of the soul, alongside his own concepts of the collective unconscious, archetypes, and the contrary forces of anima and animus.

All of this conceptual integration is gathered towards the therapeutic goal to free the individual from the domination of the unconscious. Just as it was for Freud, this liberation is accomplished through increased self-knowledge that is gained in the analytic process. Unlike Freud, however, Jung understands the nature of the unconscious very differently.

When Freud coined that now famous maxim, “Where id was, ego shall be,” he was referring specifically to the personal unconscious or “the repressed” which should be brought into consciousness. Jung does not dismiss personal unconscious, rather, he incorporates it into the much larger concept of collective unconsciousness — an aspect of the unconscious, populated by universal archetypes, shared with the whole of human kind, alive and dead.

While ideas from Eastern Spirituality, Philosophy, and Mysticism do not map directly onto Jung’s ideas, they do resonate more closely with them than many concepts from Western Psychology. This is most notable in Jung’s conception of the numinous, the archetypes, and synchronicity, all of which elude “scientific” understanding.

Jung’s unique integration of Eastern philosophy and Western psychology is no easy fit:

The aim of Jung’s commentaries are to build a bridge between the paradigms of Western Psychology and Eastern Philosophy. While that bridge is a surely a clunky one, we must remember that in his time, Jung was a cutting-edge pioneer at this meeting of worldviews. He repeatedly states that one paradigm should not be dispensed of for another, but rather integrated into a whole. As complementarity is so central to his work, he argues for it here too: like yin and yang, the philosophies developed by East and West are missing important insights that can be gained from one another — a great opportunity for synthesis.

Importantly, Jung points to the universally shared experience of suffering — an experience that drives people to both psychotherapy and spiritual guidance (famously one of the four noble truths of Buddhism). Jung notes that it’s suffering that drives all cultures to seek something beyond themselves:

“it is the tremendous experiment of becoming conscious, which nature has imposed on mankind, uniting the most diverse cultures in a common task [to overcome suffering]” — (Golden Flower, 136).

Freud was a master at creating a thoroughly Western paradigm through which to comprehend the personal unconscious — a paradigm that in its admittedly flawed nature focuses on analysis: an over-emphasis on thinking. What initially attracted Jung to Freud, however, was sheer scope and creativity of his seminal work The Interpretation of Dreams, a book which illuminated the deeply symbolic creativity of the unconscious mind.

Jung’s journey from Freud’s paradigm of the personal unconscious toward developing his own theory of the collective unconscious began through the doors that were open to him at the time — Christian theology, Greek and Roman mythology, and medieval alchemy. The arrival of newly translated texts from the East created a whole new opportunity that human experience in a novel way for Western eyes.

While there’s a long distance between Jung’s interest in the seances of his early years and Eastern Philosophy later, what unites them is his capacity to withhold critical judgement and embrace the unknown and lesser understood. Whereas Freud shed a brilliant light on the lesser-known parts of our personal psyches, Jung went beyond that to inquire about the transpersonal and collective. His seeking was always there but was re-ignited by his confrontation with the unconscious, an event, possibly psychotic, that he submitted himself to fully to better understand himself and the human psyche at large. In his courage to pursue this, and write about it, he opened up an even wider door to what lies beyond the known in all of us.

So what are your thoughts? Should Western psychology be open to insights from the East, or should it keep to its own lane? Please let me know in the comments. If you enjoy exploring the hidden histories of psychology, subscribe to Applied Psychodynamics for new posts every week.

This is a fully revised and updated version of an Medium article that has now been deleted.

Aaron Balick, PhD, is a psychotherapist, author, and GQ psyche writer exploring the crossroads of depth psychology, culture, and technology.

No matter how old you get, there’s a part of you that never quite believes it. Most of us carry an “inner age” that stubbornly refuses to budge — usually somewhere around 25. I first noticed the gap in 2001, when I was 28 years old and starting my very first job as a student therapist in a large London sixth-form college. In nervous anticipation of seeing my first ever student I had read and re-read his file, forming a clear picture of him in my mind’s eye.

At the allotted hour he knocked on the door and I invited him in. Instead of the boy I had imagined, there stood a young man, perhaps six inches taller than I, complete with a moustache. Caught somewhat off guard I picked up his file to confirm his name - it was indeed him.

“But it says here,” I said, frantically pointing at his file, “that you were born in 1985?”

“That’s right, I’m 16,” he said, then rather archly, “It’s just as well you’re the counsellor, sir, and not the maths teacher.”

It hadn’t occurred to me to do the maths because it was inconceivable to me that 1985 was sufficiently long ago to produce a fully grown teenager. In a flash I came to realise that the music that defined my teens were for him, already oldies; the mix tapes we made, already antiques; and me, already “sir”. While I saw myself as a jumped-up graduate, he saw me as one of them – a fully-fledged grown up. I was not ready.

Varieties of experiences like these multiply as time marches forward. Mine included the moment I realised I was older than the new Superman (2006) ; the uncomprehending silence I got after dropping a Buffy the Vampire Slayer reference in a lecture to a room full of first-year university students; and the first time I went to see a doctor who was younger than I. We experience these nudges and reminders as uncanny because even though we know we’re getting older, there’s a big part of us that feels like we stopped aging somewhere along the way.

Leonardo DiCaprio is as surprised as you are that he doesn’t look like he’s just stepped off the deck of the Titanic.

That Leonardo DiCaprio recently disclosed that he feels 32 despite being 50 should come as a surprise to absolutely no one. If you’re honest with yourself, you’ve been weirded out ever since you noticed he no longer looked like he just stepped off the d Titanic. For some strange reason it seems odder that celebrities age rather than stay the same.

When we get to know a public figure in their prime, we continue to identify with them as they once were. As we watch them age, they seem to peel away from the essence of the version of them we’ve internalised. Watching celebrities age throws up a mirror to ourselves too, one in which we also see a gap between how old we feel and how old we actually are.

You will spend most of your life feeling out of alignment with your actual age

Up until our mid-twenties we tend to imagine ourselves as a little bit older than we are, and from our thirties we do the reverse. It’s only at around the quarter-life mark when we enter that sweet spot of synchrony where our chronological and perceptual age fleetingly inhabit the same time zone. Soon after, they part company again, and this time for good.

It seems kind of crazy that your actual and subjective age are in sync for such a brief period; that we spend most of our lives in asynchronous delusion feels like a cruel joke. So what is it about that quarter-life moment that pulls so strongly on our self-perception? There are numerous biological, evolutionary, and cultural reasons why this is so, but the deeply personal experience of it is naturally driven by psychology.

Forever 25: Why you feel younger than you are

Once comfortably in to adulthood, why do people feel younger than they are? In short, your mid-twenties are the culmination of the two decades plus of growing, learning, and developing that preceded them. The final step, the development of your executive functioning, the cognitive skills that help you manage impulses, actions, and emotions, comes online in your early twenties. After more than 20 years in development, this final step is what neurologically marks your debut as a fully formed adult, the person you’ll come to know and identify with for the rest of your life.

How to grow older gracefully

This internalised image of yourself represents the essence of who you are, your spirit. And just like DiCaprio, it is likely to feel truer to you despite the version in the mirror that has more wrinkles and less hair. As the years increase and the gap between subjective and actual age increases, you must resist the compulsion to fight the inevitable. It’s a necessity that “youth is wasted on the young” because being too conscious of youth during youth would be ruinous to its cause. So don’t lament its passing or regret choices untaken. Instead, try to remain connected to the vitality of its spirit while connecting to the wisdom that comes with the passage of time.

What about you? Do you feel frozen in time at a certain age? Drop it in the comments — I bet most of you will say “around 25” (I’m actually 23). And if you enjoyed this piece, subscribe and share it with someone who still thinks they’re younger than the mirror suggests.

Aaron Balick, PhD is a an international keynote speaker, psychotherapist, psyche writer for GQ, and author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking connected-up instantaneous culture and the self; Keep Your Cool: How to deal with life’s worries and stress; and The Little Book of Calm: tame your anxiety, face your fears, and live free. He is an honorary senior lecturer at the Department for Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex.

We all have stuff that we’re good at and stuff that we’re bad at. Typically we lean into what comes easier to us and avoid what’s more difficult (see my previous post on how AI makes makes this worse for personal growth and development). While this is entirely natural (Freud called it “the pleasure principle”), over time it can make us pretty lopsided.

Superior and inferior functions in Jungian psychology

While it’s deeply satisfying to work in the comfort zone of our best traits, things can go amiss if we don’t pay attention to our lesser ones too. For Carl Jung, these traits aren’t seen as “good” and “bad”, but rather the “superior” and “inferior” ways in which we prefer to function. This is an important distinction because it’s less judgemental; your inferior functions aren’t “bad” — they’re just not as well developed as your superior ones.

Even with the best will and devoted practice, because they are part of your character, your inferior traits will never become as good as your superior ones — but developing our inferior capacities pays dividends far beyond just getting better at stuff. When we lean on our superior functions we tend to feel skilled and confident, while having to engage in our inferior ones can dissolve our confidence and make us feel de-skilled. Think of it as the psychological version writing with your dominant or less dominant hand.

In Jungian psychology, the way we function is better understood as an aspect of your personality, not about specific skills like verbal or numerical proficiency (though this matters too), rather your preferred way of perceiving, understanding, and being in the world: it’s about how you organise your experience.

In short, your superior functions are those that are most developed and that you are most conscious of, while your inferior ones are less developed and, at least according to Jung, closer to the unconscious. The way we function is related to our “attitude” or “personality orientation.”

Introversion vs. extraversion: What Jung really meant:

Most readers will be familiar with the two main Jungian orientations: introversion and extraversion. These attitudes will deeply influence how each of us engage in the functions that sit underneath them. You can think of attitude or orientation as a higher category under which the functions sit.

It’s really important to keep in mind (and this is the whole point of this article!) that we are comprised of all orientations and all functions, we just tend to have preferences for some over the others. To consider yourself as “an introvert” or “an extravert” is just wrong — it’s more about a preference for each attitude, and even that is dependent on context.

You can find more snappy videos like this on my Instagram by searching for @DrAaronB.

Contrary to popular understanding, nobody is purely an introvert or an extravert, we all have elements of both. It’s also not true that extroverted people are gregarious and introverted ones are shy (though, there’s correlations). These functions are better seen on a spectrum of personality preferences that everybody has access to by a matter of degree.

A simple way to understand what your dominant preference is has to do with whether what most energises you is inside or outside your own head.

Extraverts tend to be oriented towards the outer world of events, people, and activities. They tend to get energy from, and give energy to, the world outside themselves, particularly other people.

Introverts are more inwardly oriented, getting energy from their thoughts, feelings and ideas: this is where they tend to get and give most of their energy.

How introverted and extraverted you may be in any given moment is dependent a lot on context. For example, I tend to lean introverted at parties, preferring to speak to one person at a time on a deep level instead of being a social butterfly. However, when I am teaching or speaking, I lean very extravert and love to be stimulated by a room full of people. Those familiar with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) will be familiar with the situation-dependant aspect of this.

The four psychological functions: Sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition

It’s helpful to think of superior functioning as your “super power” and inferior functioning as your “secret door.”

Sitting under the general attitude of extraversion and introversion we have a set of preferred ways of functioning in the world. Here it starts to get kind of complicated, but I’ll do my best to keep it simple. For Carl Jung there are four main functions that we all draw upon to get information about the world around us and then organise that information — the names of them can be quite misleading, so I will define them here:

Sensation: Using of the five senses to obtain information about the world around us.

Thinking: Using logical analysis and rational thought telling us what’s happening.

Feeling: Using emotions, feelings, and values to understand the world around us.

Intuition: Using patterns to draw meaning out of the world, finding the “gestalt” from the pieces.

Hopefully you can see why we need all of these ways of perceiving the world in order to function properly — too much reliance on any one of them can leave blindspots in the way your perceive the world — and the larger those blind spots become, the more you can miss. By looking at these you can probably get a pretty good idea what you’re good at and what you are less good at. Again, those who know the MBTI, which is based on Jung’s thinking, will be familiar with this.

Your superior function is your “superpower”, your inferior function is your “secret door.”

When you’re in working within your superior function, you are like a super hero. You feel like you are in flow and that you can accomplish anything. This is why you tend to lean into those superior qualities — you feel competent, secure, and good! Sometimes, however, you are forced to lean into your inferior ones, and when that happens, it has the opposite effect on you — we feel incompetent, deskilled, and out of sorts.

Check out my recent article Want to Survive the AI Revolution? Develop your inner masochist in GQ Magazine about how the dangers that AI poses by offering you easy ways to avoid developing your functions.

Superior functioning is your super power because it’s where you feel most at home, it’s where you rock. Because it is so deeply linked to how your perceive the world you inhabit, it has the power to make you feel secure and confident in your body and in your preferred context. According to Jung your superior function is “always an expression of the conscious personality, of its aims, will, and general performance.”

The Shadow: Why Jung said you should love what you’re bad at

Why you should appreciate your inferior function is less obvious; why should you love what you’re bad at and makes you feel de-skilled? Jung suggests that our inferior functions offer an opportunity for us to grow because they are “closer to the unconscious.” Contrary to feeling at home and in control like we do in superior functioning, when in inferior function we may feel out of control and even afraid. This darker less familiar part of our psyche is what Jung called “the shadow”, a central concept in what would become known as “shadow work.”

Because we’re unpracticed in the shadow, it feels alien to us when we are forced to engage with it. If we continue to avoid engaging with it across the life span, we deny ourselves access to the “secret door” of personal growth. It is by pushing through discomfort and the less familiar that the greatest opportunity for personal growth lies.

Sounds pretty scary, right? Well, it can be if it remains unrecognised and repressed, when this happens, it gets stuck in our “shadow” — and anything that gets stuck there is liable to sneak up on us and wreak havoc when it can.

Developing our inferior function isn’t only a sensible thing to do so we become more well rounded or to logically have a Plan B when we can’t draw on our superior one. Developing the inferior function helps us to gain access to our shadow; it throws light into our unconscious; and it helps us to grow more securely into our greatest potential. It also helps us to better understand and relate to those who have functions that differ from ours, thereby making us more compassionate human beings.

Functions in couples and teams: Functions that complement each other

As it happens we tend to find ways to deal with our inferior functioning quite unconsciously. For example, many of us find partners that complement our functioning, and in doing so we outsource some of that functioning to them. While this might strike some kind of balance, if both partners don’t also develop those inferior capacities it can be a recipe for disaster later. The same thing happens in the workplace. Great teams are comprised of personality types and functions that complement each other. However, they shouldn’t be altogether compartmentalised as that can damage interpersonal relations and miss opportunities for synergies.

How to love your inferior function: a self development guide

While you should definitely surround yourself with others who have different typologies from you, try and do so while developing your own inferior ones!

Here are some suggestions:

1. Self-awareness is key: Look inside, you know yourself pretty well, so you probably have a pretty good idea of what needs developing. Identify those traits you want to develop and set an intention to do so. Getting a good therapist is a good start if you want to go at it seriously.

2. Get feedback: Though you’ll have a pretty good idea yourself, the nature of inferior functions is that they tend to hide from you. So reach out to trusted others at home or at work and get a second-hand evaluation of the areas you may need to be looking at. The aim is to get this information from trusted and caring others, so it should be done with sensitivity and compassion.

3. Don’t avoid situations that require your inferior functioning: Avoidance is our favourite way of letting inferior functions languish. Subject yourself to uncomfortable experiences that will develop that function and strengthen it. Just like working out weaker muscles at the gym, you don’t want to go full throttle all at once, but start a little at a time to build in the skills.

4. Allow yourself to feel de-skilled: I’m a words-guy so I recently joined a life drawing class. This was really challenging for me and I was not happy with the results. However, it’s not about results, it’s about confronting that discomfort and opening that door to your less developed, more unconscious parts of yourself.

5. Hang with others who have skills in the areas in which you are inferior: Let them be guides to you, learn from them. Try to see the world through their eyes. Challenge yourself.

6. Play: Building your inferior capacities is challenging but it can be fun. See it as an opportunity to grow into who you really are, “individuation” which is the essence of Jungian personal development. The great irony is that while in your inferior function you may not feel yourself your are in fact growing more and more into yourself each time — expanding yourself — individuating.

This is a fully revised and updated version of an original blog post from 2023.

Aaron Balick, PhD is an international keynote speaker, psychotherapist, psyche writer for GQ, and author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking connected-up instantaneous culture and the self; Keep Your Cool: How to deal with life’s worries and stress; and The Little Book of Calm: tame your anxiety, face your fears, and live free. He is an honorary senior lecturer at the Department for Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex.

All Jung quotes came from Volume 7 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung

I’m no luddite. I’m happy as Larry that some brilliant soul invented the wheel so I don’t have to drag things around on my back all the time. I’m also very grateful for my washing machine, dishwasher, and hoover - and most of all - that as a writer and academic, I grew up in a world of Microsoft Word instead of a mechanical typewriter (the respect I have for writers of the analogue age is boundless). In short, I love how our tools have made things easier in the past, but I’m really uncomfortable with what tech has been seeking to ease in recent years.

This is a supplement to my recent GQ article Want to Survive the AI Revolution? Find your inner masochist providing extra content, resources, and suggestions for my Substack subscribers. Pleased read the original article first so you’ll know what I’m talking about!

Is technology giving us what we want at the expense of what we need?

It’s now just over a decade since I published The Psychodynamics of Social Networking (PSN). While in tech-years this may seem millennia ago, it remains relevant today because it focusses less on any particular tech platform or innovation (which change very quickly) and more on how human psychology (which doesn’t) is mediated by tech. One of the foundations of the theory that I laid out at that time how technology lowers the bar to just about everything - and in lowering that bar it allows us to skip important steps between our desires and our outcomes.

In PSN I argued that while human beings fundamentally need to give and receive authentic recognition to each other, to use the colloquial expression, “to really be seen”, social media offered us the much more superficial experience of validation instead. My go-to metaphor is that this is like needing the nutrition of a salad but getting a donut instead. Donuts are great, but you cannot live on them.

But donuts are addictive - just like getting likes, follows, and shares is. The longer we go living on donuts, the harder it is to get used to eating salads again, and we start to get sick.

Dating apps are like canapés

Dating apps were designed to take one of the big pain points out of dating - that is meeting new people - and they did a wonderful job. Too wonderful. They no doubt make it easier to meet people, but they also make it much more difficult to get to know them better. It’s much easier to graze upon a selection of canapés on them than it is to settle into enjoying a nice long meal. And while there’s no doubt that they have enabled many many people to dine with each other happily, that’s not what they are designed to do.

In solving the pain point of meeting, it created a bigger one in sustaining. Not only that, but the more you get lost in the meeting, the less you have a chance to develop the skills that are required for the sustaining, and these are the very skills we need to form happy long lasting relationships.

Why do we ghost people?

Put simply, because managing interpersonal relationships is among the hardest things that humans do (it’s also among the most gratifying). Finding that sweet spot between our similarities is terrifically difficult (just look at the state of the world), but being able to manage it correlates to all sorts of things like mental and physical health and a long life. The trouble is, all our digital platforms seek to compromise this.

Every communication that happens across a platform is stripped, to some degree, of the complexity of that communication in a live face to face situation. The more we become accustomed to these simpler communications, the less good we become at managing interpersonal complexity.

This is why ghosting happens. It is easier to ghost someone than it is to respectfully and decently tell them your not interested - it’s also a lot less humane. It’s easier to text a gripe, email a complaint, or lash out on a social network than it is to sit across someone and talk it through. But every time we make that task easier, we make it harder on ourselves to draw on those skills when we need them - and trust me, we need them.

What’s the best way to choose how to use AI?

For the record, I’m writing this post all by myself, but I may very well use AI to help me make a promotional LinkedIn post for it. After all, I’ve already done the hard work. For me, this is a good use of AI. Should I use AI to write the article itself, what is the point? Not only is there none of me in it, I also miss the opportunity to challenge myself to come up with the goods that keep me sharp.

This isn’t to deny that it’s sometimes tempting to get AI to do some of the thinking for me as well - it can be. For the moment however, when I’ve asked it to that I’m unsatisfied with the result 95% of the time anyway - I can do it better myself. But even when it gets better, and it will, I will have to resist that temptation because to do so would defeat the whole point of being a creative person contributing to the world!

In my GQ article I referenced some research that shows the cognitive cost of having AI do the heavy lifting for you when it comes to creative and intellectual work. Even partial assistance can have a significantly deteriorate learning. Further research points to “metacognitive laziness” and a reduction in critical thinking. Much of this research is new, and much more needs to be done, but I believe these are signs of a clear and present danger.

Don’t let influence outshine expertise

What is becoming very clear to me is how the dangers of AI are closely correlated to how it is used and at what level of expertise. In a previous post I discussed how I picked up an error that ChatGPT made that a novice in my field would not have picked up. I was able to make use of ChatGPT because I have the expertise to make these critical distinctions - distinctions that I am only able to make because I engaged in the hard work of becoming an expert.

The confluence of social media and AI have created a topsy turvy world where influence trumps expertise, and because of this, people are motivated more to become influencers than they are to acquire real expertise. If you have a broad reach on TikTok, you can just have AI create content for you and use you popular algorithm to propagate it. You end up being an empty vessel through which manufactured content is spread. It’s not only a very dangerous situation for society, but it’s not so good for you either. I mean, where are you anyway?

Do The Hard Work, You Won’t Regret It

A “steep learning curve” is steep because it recognises the effort required to acquire the learning. We increase our weight resistance at the gym because the continued physical challenge helps us to develop to be our best. We stick through conflict in relationships and try to work it out with couples counselling because we know that intimate relationships require work in order to thrive.

There’s no more reason to plow a field with a hoe if you can use a tractor than there is to get some AI assistance for a powerpoint presentation in area of your expertise. What I am suggesting is that you choose very carefully where you cut your corners because you will pay for it later. Here are some final take aways.

FAQ:

Q: How can AI undermine learning?

A: When AI removes the friction from challenging tasks, it short-circuits the very processes that build skill and expertise. Research shows this can reduce neural engagement, weaken critical thinking, and encourage “metacognitive laziness” — a reliance on the tool instead of one’s own capabilities.

If you want to use it for learning, make sure you don’t let it do the work for you. Instead of using it to help you write an essay, use it to quiz you, test you, and have a conversation with you about the material. Make it challenge you!

Q: When is using AI a good idea?

A: Use AI to support tasks in areas where you already have expertise and can critically evaluate its output. Avoid using it to produce content that you want to learn more about, where the struggle is essential for growth.

Q: Why is friction important for personal development?

A: Friction — whether in relationships, creative work, or learning — pushes us beyond our comfort zones, strengthening resilience, adaptability, and problem-solving. Without it, we risk stagnation and a loss of capability.

Q: What’s the difference between convenience and corner-cutting?

A: Convenience removes unnecessary barriers. Corner-cutting skips essential steps. The former makes life more efficient; the latter can erode the skills and depth that give your work and life meaning.

I used AI to assist myself in making this FAQ - which is well within my personal “fair use” policy.

Aaron Balick, PhD is a an international keynote speaker, psychotherapist, psyche writer for GQ, and author of The Psychodynamics of Social Networking connected-up instantaneous culture and the self; Keep Your Cool: How to deal with life’s worries and stress; and The Little Book of Calm: tame your anxiety, face your fears, and live free. He is an honorary senior lecturer at the Department for Psychosocial and Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Essex.