The ubiquitous chatter of AI has flooded the imagination of the clinician with depictions of irrelevancy, despair, captivation, and trepidation. This 3-hour ethics seminar led by psychoanalyst, Scott Koeneman, PsyD, and psychoanalytic psychotherapist, Paul Hoard, PhD, LMHC, is an incitement within the promises and perils of AI and psychoanalysis. As the AI revolution gains momentum, the clinician confronts its implications on a mind moderated by this technology, witnesses the costs to the therapeutic frame, and is obligated to engage their own ambivalences. Participants will consider how interactions with AI chatbots/LLM’s are reshaping our emotional, relational, and experiential lives. Topics such as smart phone cult like grooming, rising anxieties about our collective future, AI psychosis, and the epidemic of loneliness will be considered. Participants will reflect on how the clinician can ethically engage with LLM conversations, treatment impingements, and elaborations on the treatment frame. Consideration will be given to the mutual engagement of such things as note writing and other AI augmentation to clinical practice. The presenters will promote an ethical imperative around the acquisition of procedural knowledge in the use of AI to effectively challenge and articulate the implicit dangers to human subjectivity. Psychoanalytically oriented clinicians are embedded in a community that has been wrestling with the questions of consciousness, desire, and personhood as applied to human suffering and thriving since our inception and as such have much to offer the current conversation around AI.
© 2009-2026 American Psychoanalytic Association | 122 East 42nd Street, Suite 2310, New York, NY 10168 | Phone: (212) 752-0450 | [email protected]


