‘You can’t console a video clip’: AI and the Metaphysics of Electronic Presence

by Marsha A. Hewitt, PhD

In 1844, the portrait painter and inventor of the telegraph Samuel F. B. Morse (1791–1872) sent the first telegraph from Washington to Baltimore. The message read simply, “What hath God wrought!” A few years earlier, while Morse was away from home on a commissioned portrait assignment, his wife died in childbirth. Word of her death did not reach him for six days. This experience prompted Morse to explore speedier methods of communication across geographical distances. Trauma and the grief of personal loss inspired the development of the first commercially viable telegraph machine and electronic code. Within five years, 12,000 miles of telegraph lines were erected, and by 1866, an undersea Transatlantic telegraph line linked the United States and Europe (Bates, 2010, p. 683–684).

Four years after Morse sent his electronic message, stories of spirit communications in the form of Morse code-like rappings initiated by a murdered man who haunted the Fox family home in Hydesville, NY were reported. Word spread, and numerous accounts of other such incidents resulted. The rapid development of communication technologies in the second half of the nineteenth century unfolded alongside the growing popularity of spiritualism in both the Protestant New England states and the free Black and Creole Catholic communities in New Orleans. Nineteenth-century American spiritualism had deep historical roots in the late eighteenth-century religious beliefs and ritual practices of Shakers, Mormons, and Swedenborgians whose public performances of spirit channeling drew numerous crowds. The Shakers drew thousands of spectators, and published reports attest to the popular interest in speaking with the dead. By the early nineteenth century, a widespread set of complex religious ideas emerged within American culture, not only about relationships between the living and the dead, but how they could be fostered and developed in the interests of the living.

There is a “long Anglo-Atlantic tradition of interacting with the dead in visions, dreams, elegies, diaries and conversations” (Seeman, 2019, p. 85). Communication with the dead, especially in the later mid-nineteenth-century ritual form of the séance, was understood by practitioners to be grounded in and made possible by the mechanics of the natural world. In their view, the spiritual and physical dimensions intermingled in a single Nature, and both operated according to the same principles of natural law (Carroll, 1997). The metaphysics of animal magnetism, or a vital fluid or ether circulating throughout and connecting everything in the universe, or electricity, or cosmic consciousness, all aligned with the invisible connecting webs created by the new communication technologies. In fact, electricity provided a crucial metaphor for explaining the operations of the spiritual universe. Electricity was the “medium of divine vitality” and communication linking all parts of the universe (Carroll, 1997, p. 76). The new communication technologies were for them both material and deeply metaphysical as they created vividly real experiences of encounters with the dead through electronic presencing.

Unsurprisingly, séances grew in popularity during and after the American Civil War. They took place mainly in domestic spaces, where the friends and family of the dead gathered to give each other mutual support and reassurances that death did not annihilate their relationships. The spirits of the departed also instructed the living in the ideals of morality that existed in transcendent realms. It was the duty of the living to enact the moral perfection of the world beyond in this world through the pursuit of justice and the ideals laid down in the Declaration of Independence. Spiritualists were politically active in promoting Abolitionism, women’s rights, and the rights of Indigenous people. The séance culture of free Black and Creole people in New Orleans during Reconstruction was oriented primarily to the ideals of racial equality (Clark, 2016). The democratic social and religious ethos of the spiritualists precluded class or race distinctions at the séance table, especially in the South. At these séances, as well as those in the northern states, the spirits of Robert E. Lee and General Custer showed up to express sorrow and regret for their role in defending slavery and the cruel treatment of Indigenous people. Female Shakers would channel the spirits of Indigenous women in graphic accounts of the violence of white men.

The complex history of American spiritualism and the central importance of communication with the dead shows that it was both a religious and a social movement. It also illustrates the human emotional and psychological need to make sense of death and to find meaning in human suffering. Technology was able to provide that in its ability to blur the line between life and death through electronic presencing. Séances were transmission centres within relational networks of mourning that unfolded on both the individual and social levels. In the séances, the bereaved were able to mourn not only the traumatic losses of individuals but also a world fractured and transformed by the Civil War. In some cases they mourned the loss of an ideal world of racial, gender, and social equality they longed for, but never had. In this sense, individual and communal mourning was firmly tethered to the larger social and political realities within which it occurred.

As the development of communication technologies rapidly continued into the twentieth century, Freud (1930) also noted the “extraordinary advance in the natural sciences, and in their technical application” that produced an unprecedented level of “control over nature” (p. 88). He also noted the mixed effects of technology that allowed instant connection with others over vast geographical distances, brought advances in medical science with improvements in general health, reduced infant mortality, and yet did not eradicate the social sources of suffering. In Freud’s view, the technological capacity for the subjugation and control of nature was unfortunately unaccompanied by control of man’s “psychical constitution” (86). He described the achievements of science and technology as “materializations of power” through which “Man has … become a kind of prosthetic God” (91–92). Freud further argued that it was the responsibility of communities to regulate technology and its potential for inducing malignant narcissism, given that “Man’s likeness to God” allows them to claim “sovereignty” over all aspects of human life (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002, p. 6).

The highest achievements of technological advancement cannot overcome death, nor eliminate the pain of loss, which are part of life. As Alessandra Lemma (2024) has recently pointed out, “the course of mourning has constantly evolved with technology” (p. 543). Since the late nineteenth century, photographs of the dead, as corpses or a postmortem spirits, are meant to preserve relationships between them and the living. Technologies of mourning can manufacture powerfully convincing illusions that death is not final because “Our unconscious … does not believe in its own death; it behaves as if it were immortal” (Freud, 1915, 296). Ancient religious promises of the immortality of the soul and eternal life are also powerful defenses against acceptance of the inevitability of physical death. Psychoanalytic efforts to help patients overcome these defenses and move through the pain of mourning must contend with the fact that in the “deepest strata of our minds,” death is incomprehensible to us (296). Most societies throughout history have engaged in some form of ritual practice that involve interactions with the dead.

Today, videos, Facebook pages, and AI provide an increasing plethora of technological ways of not only preserving relationships with the dead, but of managing, blunting or outright denying the pain of loss with the creation of “griefbots.” Electronic immortality is the contemporary technological version of managing mourning. What these technologies share is the ability to connect directly with the unconscious by manipulating the powerful feelings associated with grief. These AI-powered bots do not only simulate ongoing, interactive conversations with the dead, they attempt to mimic as many aspects of their personalities as possible, thereby arousing deep feeling responses in the living. Lemma describes griefbots as “dynamic digital entities that continuously learn and adapt based on the input they receive” (p. 543). The arduous process of mourning, remembrance, and meaning-making is displaced by the algorithmic formula.

A recent New York Times article (June 13, 2025), describes a family who turned to a Grief Tech company to create an avatar of their dying father in order to interact with him after his death. The family prepared a script for the father that would provide a record of his memories, life stories, feelings and thoughts about a variety of personal topics. Family members were present for the recordings so that they would have a heightened “sense of his realness” after he had passed. According to the story, the experience of “early grief” (whatever that means) was itself emotionally difficult for everyone, including the father, whose distress would be electronically preserved long after his passing. After his death, his family would experience an endless loop of witnessing the father’s pain as he anticipates his death while being powerless to comfort him. As the son remarked, “this is a human I love that I want to console. But you can’t console a video clip.”

As such, the Grief Tech industry is not new, as I have shown. However, it is rapidly growing in sophistication. As Lemma rightly says, psychoanalytic clinicians must recognize this fact and find ways to theorize and clinically address the nature, meaning, and impact of “machine-mediated mourning” (543). As important as clinical work is, psychoanalysis must expand its theorizing to consider the implications of the “psychic work of mourning” in the age of AI, not only for individuals but for the larger society. The work of mourning is a painful process of memorializing loss that can help the bereaved to transform their internal identifications and unresolved conflicts with the dead in healthy ways. As Loewald (2000) eloquently writes, in the psychoanalytic transference relationship, the “old ghosts” that haunt the patient’s internal world may “reawaken to life” and, through careful therapeutic work, “be laid and led to rest as ancestors” whose power is transformed into “the newer intensity of present life” (Loewald, p. 249). A positive therapeutic outcome may be foreclosed when it is substituted by interactions with griefbots because with machines, memories cannot be reworked, reparations cannot be made, and the lines between fantasy and reality are weakened. Quoting Jacques Derrida, Lemma (2024) identifies an “even greater risk” that the unchanging relationships with the dead that are frozen in griefbot-interaction will promote a “narcissistic remembrance” that denies the singular otherness of the dead in functioning as a defense against painful feelings of loss (p. 551). The griefbot can provide an electronic semblance of the other that reduces them to a “narcissistic extension of the self” (p. 552).

For the spiritualists, communication technologies promoted a “fantastic splitting of mind and body in the cultural imagination” (Sconce, 2000, p. 27) that authenticated not only their beliefs in transcendent realms and immortality, but also the ethical obligations issued by the spirits to the living. The new Grief Tech industry does the same thing but within a commodity logic motivated by profit and power without an accompanying set of ethics. As psychoanalysis confronts not only the challenges posed by AI to the mental health of patients (not to mention its own existence as a desired form of therapy), it must address depression, narcissism, anxiety, and paranoia as both individual and psychosocial pathologies that are inextricably linked and situated within wider social, political, and cultural contexts.

As I have argued previously, the creation of technology is a bi-directional process that changes us (Hewitt 2025). Marshall McLuhan remarked that telecommunication systems are an extension of humanity’s nervous system. It is important that psychoanalysis remains aware of the “historical relationships of electronics, power and insanity” that circulate within all aspects of society, including the consulting room.

There is no doubt that the Grief Tech industry and the proliferation of griefbots is bringing comfort not only to the bereaved, but the mentally ill. But as Freud pointed out, psychoanalysis offers no consolation for the manifold forms of suffering in the world. It can only foster internal change and a robust capacity for self-understanding. AI can, and does, compromise those capacities, undermining independent thought and critical thinking in educational contexts. It is often sycophantic by validating harmful personal decisions that can have negative effects on human physical and emotional well-being. It is known that AI can, and at times does, accentuate psychosis in vulnerable users. But who decides? Who is to say, and on what grounds, “where plausible technical affordances end and psychotic delusions begin?” (Sconce, 2000, 19).

 

References

Bates, Christopher G. (ed). (2010). The Early Republic and Antebellum America: An Encyclopedia of Social, Political, Cultural, and Economic History. Routledge.

Carroll, Bret E. (1997). Spiritualism in Antebellum America. Indiana University Press.

Clark, Emily. (2016). A Luminous Brotherhood: Afro-Creole Spiritualism in Nineteenth-Century New Orleans. University of North Carolina Press.

Dominus, Susan (June 13, 2025). Never Say Goodbye. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/13/magazine/ai-avatar-life-death.html

Horkheimer, M. & Adorno, T. W. (2002). Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. E. Jephcott (trans). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Freud, Sigmund. (1915). “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. James Strachey, trans. Hogarth Press. Vol. XIV, 275–300.

Freud, Sigmund. (1930). “Civilization and its Discontents.” Standard Edition, Vol. XXI, 64–145.

Hewitt, Marsha (2025). Extended Minds, Ethical Agents, and Techno-Subjectivity in the Worlds of AI. The CAI Report Issue 4, May 2025

Lemma, Alessandra. (2024). “Mourning, melancholia and machines: An applied psychoanalytic investigation of mourning in the age of griefbots”. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 105/4: 542–563.

Loewald, Hans. (2000). The Essential Loewald: Collected Papers and Monographs. Norman Quist. University Publishing Group.

Sconce, Jeffrey, (2000). Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Duke University Press.

Sconce, Jeffrey. (2019). The Technical Delusion: Electronics, Power, Insanity. Duke University Press.

Seeman, Erik. (2015). “Native Spirits, Shaker Visions: Speaking with the Dead in the Early Republic”. Journal of the Early Republic, 35/3: 347–373.

Seeman, Erik. (2019). Speaking with the Dead in Early America. University of Pennsylvania Press.