Three conversations on three podcasts this month approached AI and the psyche from different angles, and they resonated with each other in illuminating ways, lending further credence to that old psychoanalytic idea that however free the associations, you can bet that important themes will coalesce and arise.
It’s been a busy month since I got back from the Festival de las Ideas in Madrid where I spoke to psychiatrist and phenomenologist Thomas Fuchs about embodiment in the age of AI. Since then, three podcasts upon which I’ve been a guest have dropped, which, I’m gratified to find, have brought in a bunch of new subscribers, so a big welcome to you if you’re new here. For the OGs, thanks for sticking with me.
“Conspiracy Lite”
The first was a conversation with Candida Yates and Callum Blades on the British Psychoanalytic Council’s Psychocultural podcast, Conspiracy. Callum is currently conducting field research in online conspiracy wormholes, notably anti-vax communities on Telegram. Though conspiracies haven’t featured much in my own work, I found resonances in the conversation that surprisingly links the psychodynamics of conspiracy thinking to how social media and AI interact with identity and the algorithmic self. Where Callum is highlighting shared conspiracy narratives about culture, I began to think about how identity narratives, as aided and abetted by online life, are a form of “conspiracy lite” because “they reduce the world of possibility to a single explanation.”
“’Conspiracy Lite’, [is]like identifying with a mental health diagnosis … it’s helpful up to a point, right? I’ve got these set of conditions or experiences in the world that I don’t understand or may or may not inhibit me in particular ways. Then I find it, and then I start to build a story that [makes it] the source of everything.”
There is no cabal of Illuminati in smoky rooms in conspiracy lite. Instead, you start to investigate something that relates to your personal life, something you are struggling with, for example why dating is so hard or why you have always felt a bit different. Thus begins the cycle whereby the algorithm obligingly feeds your curiosity back to you until it sets into an explanation for everything.
A young man innocently goes looking for dating advice, only he comes out with a complete theory of women: it’s probably not a good one, but it may seem to resolve something he’s been struggling with. Someone else may be struggling with anxiety, distress, or their experience of neurodiversity and stumble upon a label that helps makes sense of it. This is almost always helpful at first, but there is a point at which it can become counter productive. The more you dig, the more comprehensive a story that label provides to the point that it risks becoming the whole story, limiting other possibilities, ossifying identity, and inhibiting individuation.
Psychologically this process does the same job as a conspiracy theory: it lowers anxiety by reducing a world of possibility to a single comprehensible answer. The only difference is that the theory is about yourself.
Attachment hacking by psychopaths
Next was a conversation with Lisa Marchiano on This Jungian Life on “outsourcing love”. There I made an uncomfortable case for something I’ve written about both here and for GQ, that though we may feel our helpful chatbot is there for us, it is essentially psychopathic.
“It may have a warm exterior, but its heart is code.”
Since we all know that there is no there there, it forces us to ask why it works so well on us anyway. The answer is that we are essentially built for attachment, and something that so fluently performs human interaction, whether we know it’s an algorithm or not, still appeals to our underlying attachment structure: we almost can’t help but buy the lie. Years of social media have already trained us that we can seek instant validation and come back for more anytime we want; intelligent chatbots are another iteration of that, only better designed.
The Self, the whole Self, and nothing but the Self
The third conversation was with jon wilson on his Jung and the World podcast. Jon took our conversation right back to the beginning, and why I started studying the psychodynamics of technology in the first place and what provoked me to write The Psychodynamics of Social Networking (currently being revised and updated). In this conversation we discussed Winnicott’s concept of the “false self” (though I prefer to use the term “partial self”) and Jung’s similar theory of the “persona”, the version of ourselves that we put on like a mask in different social situations.
The false self and persona are particularly vulnerable in social media because that’s where our egos are implicitly asked to perform to our imagined audiences there. While neither the false self nor the persona are essentially pathological, they can become so when we buy the performance as our own full identity; in this case the partial self takes the place of the whole self (or Self). The Self (with the capital S) is what comprehensively contains what we are, our conscious and unconscious, our ego and its objects – identifying the partial self as the whole thing is deeply limiting.
Our conversation also took an interesting turn into discussing the collective unconscious, and that being a human being goes much further than the individual into the collective. We began to wonder together where this new technology might be taking us – on one side the loss of individuality and induction into a hive-mind, and on the other, transcendence – will it be the Buddha or the Borg? Whether either will actually happen in the future is secondary, I think, to what our fantasies of either tell us about ourselves today.
If you’ve not yet had a chance to listen, I suggest you pick one of these conversations that might appeal to you and see what you find. If you do so, I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
Coming Up:
Thursday 8 October, 7 to 9pm UK time (2pm ET)
AI and the Psyche: The First Summit on Artificial Intelligence and the Psyche
Join us online for free. Lisa Marchiano and I will be co-chairing a conversation with some of the most interesting minds working in this area including: Todd Essig, Alessandra Lemma, James Muldoon, Glen Slater, Zak Stein, and Sherry Turkle.
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 formerly the psychology columnist for GQ. His newsletter Depth Psychology in the Digital Age is published on Substack.