A Note From The CAI Co-Chairs
by Todd Essig, PhD and Amy Levy, PsyD
One challenge the AI revolution presents is the way awareness frequently undermines engagement. How does one maintain a stance of critical, psychoanalytic engagement—something essential for crafting novel, viable solutions—after recognizing the problems and risks AI presents? It is just so easy to bury our heads in the sand or retreat behind the walls of our institutes and organizations. Sometimes we just throw our hands in the air, conclude it a lost cause, and hand over our clinical and theoretical work to AI systems designed for corporate profit and not human well-being.
Living in this tension of pulls to flee or surrender while remaining alert, feeling, thinking analysts is, we believe, necessary for unleashing creative resilience and deeply psychoanalytic responses to what AI both threatens and promises. We’ve learned that establishing this generative analytic stance demands two essential features: community and conversation.
We see this working in our CAI meetings and reading group, in our monthly CAI-Institute/Center Working Group where educational leaders gather to share problems, questions, and solutions in an open-minded environment that supports insight through shared emotionally sensitive holding. And we see it working in the classes we teach, and the workshops we offer.
But there’s much more to be done. The CAI is now developing a program to provide interested psychoanalytic practitioners an opportunity for community and conversation about the radical transformations to psychoanalytic care AI is fomenting. This program aims to provide a “safe space” where providers of psychoanalytic care can gather to share their experiences and learn together.
These will be monthly peer support/supervision groups. We know that many of you are already hearing from your patients about their relationships with AI entities, sometimes supporting and other times undermining the benefits of psychoanalytic care, and even of fundamental well-being. This will be a place to think together about these and other changes to self-experience, intimate relating, and even desire itself that we are starting to encounter clinically.
It is our goal that these groups, once launched, will provide some of the community and conversation that we all require to live in the tension of our flee-or-surrender responses to the AI revolution. Our hope is that they’ll provide a supportive internal and external environment so that awareness can lead to effective engagement.
Stay tuned.
