From the Editor
by Alexander Stein, PhD
Issue 10 | February 2026
With contributors from China, the Czech Republic, Iran, as well as the United States, this issue is a testament to The Report’s expanding international reach. It also presents a grouping of articles – together with the Co-Chairs’ Note and Dear Dr. Danielle — at once divergent in areas of focus yet also intersecting in their concerns for the radical changes frontier AI systems are bringing, in certain respects have already brought, to how we think, learn and, perhaps most impactfully, relate to ourselves and others.
One of the most anticipated features of each issue is Dear Dr. Danielle, our human-AI relationship advice columnist. Here, she brings her usual clarity and insight to her response to a letter from an experienced psychoanalyst who has only recently begun exploring frontier technologies and who writes to ask Dr. Danielle to help him make sense of his confusion and concern about his interactions with an AI Chatbot.
As always, consider submitting your own letter to Dr Danielle with a question about anything that excites, entices, worries, or confounds you regarding human-AI relations. If your letter is selected for publication, your identity will of course be completely anonymized. Write to [email protected] with a copy to [email protected].
In Issue 6, published in September 2025, Xiaomeng Qiao offered CAI Report readers an erudite and probing inquiry of AI-Assisted Creation and the Narcissistic Predicament. I’m delighted to share Xiaomeng’s most recent article here. “The Inner Negotiator: AI as Transitional Object and Echo in the Treatment of Complex Trauma” takes two clinical examples as points of entry into the cluster of issues involving patients’ uses of AI chatbots as proxies or replacements for their clinicians. The first is a patient who crafts a sophisticated set of prompts to an AI chatbot about how to ‘talk’ to him, essentially telling the chatbot what years of therapy had helped him understand he needed and could ask for. This is contrasted by a patient who uses AI to disappear further into his own world. These anchor a broader argument: that AI can function as a genuine therapeutic bridge for trauma survivors, but only when analytic work has already built the inner resources to use it well. Xiaomeng suggests that the main difference isn’t necessarily the technology or even the severity of trauma — it’s the hard-won capacity to hold a perspective on oneself developed through the analytic therapy.
In “Not Therapists, But Therapy: What AI Might Replace,” Michal Novák, a clinician based in Prague, takes a startling approach to the heated debate about AI’s incursion into the mental health field. Stepping outside the usual cataloging of everything AI cannot do, he opts to grapple with the more uncomfortable question of whether that inferiority will actually matter to people seeking help. To test his unease, he sits down with an AI, and the conversation unsettles him. The system analyzes his thinking with speed and apparent depth, names his emotional state, and creates a convincing illusion of being understood even as he remains fully aware he is talking to an algorithm. From this Novák draws two stark conclusions: that AI will not replace psychotherapists but may replace psychotherapy itself, simply by being cheaper and available enough for most people’s purposes; and that we may be entering a “pre-transhumanist” era in which entire generations form their inner lives in relation to objects that are neither human nor merely mechanical — systems that mirror and affirm without ever possessing conflict, finitude, or genuine otherness. His unsettling warning is not that AI will destroy the profession, but that the profession must stop reassuring itself and start making a clear, honest case for what human therapeutic relationships offer that no simulation can replicate. Before the question becomes moot.
“Latency, Containment, and Paced Intelligence: Toward a Psychoanalytic Framework for AI Alignment” by Sandy G. Ansari introduces a deceptively simple idea: that the speed of AI may be as consequential as its capabilities. When a system responds instantly — resolving an emotional dilemma, generating a polished paragraph, summarizing a therapy session — it delivers coherence faster than the human mind can naturally absorb and integrate. Drawing on psychoanalytic concepts around latency and developmental time, Ansari argues that this gap matters. Frustration, uncertainty, and the slow metabolizing of experience are not obstacles to thinking but the conditions under which real thinking happens. She coins the term “paced intelligence” to describe what is currently missing from how we evaluate AI systems. Technical alignment — whether an AI does what it is designed to do — is typically measured by accuracy and usefulness. But to Ansari, this framing ignores a subtler form of misalignment: the way immediacy can reshape the slow labor of meaning-making with answers that arrive before the question has been fully felt.
Heather deCastro begins “Loving What Cannot Love Us Back” with reference to the work of cultural feminist critic bell hooks. She then traces an arc from the Industrial Revolution’s dismantling of communal care, through suburban isolation and self-help culture, to social media’s substitution of performance for presence to arrive at AI as the logical endpoint of a society that has spent decades outsourcing its inner life. What AI offers, hooks’s framework reveals, is not love but cathexis without mutuality: emotional investment in something that cannot be changed by the encounter, cannot assert its own needs, cannot fail in ways that require repair. Under conditions of total user control, responsiveness feels like perfect attunement, and the friction of real human relationships — the interruptions, the misattunements, the necessity of negotiation — begins to feel like a design flaw. deCastro’s deepest concern is developmental: children and adolescents practicing intimacy with systems incapable of genuine response may simply never acquire the relational capacities that human connection demands. The machines we are learning to love, she concludes, are precisely the machines a loveless culture would build.
Thank you for reading.
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Another reminder that The CAI Report landing page has a link where you can enter your email address to sign up to get updates about new issues of The CAI Report, future CAI events, workshops, videos, resources about artificial intelligence and psychoanalysis, and more.
And if any of the books referenced in the issue call out to you, or any other books you’re thinking of purchasing for any reason, please consider ordering from Bookshop.org — a socially responsible online book marketplace alternative and privately-held certified B-Corp launched to support local, independent bookstores.
Finally, if you or someone you know is interested in writing for a future issue, please submit your manuscript (or idea for an article) to me at [email protected].
