Notable New Books

Amy Levy, PsyD, one of the Co-Chairs of APsA’s President’s Commission on Artificial Intelligence, a contributor to The CAI Report, and a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has published a new book with Karnac Books:

The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive

254 pages | Catalogue No: 98428 | ISBN 13: 9781800134119 | ISBN 10: 1800134118

A clinical exploration of artificial intelligence (AI) that Amy Levy renames “alien intelligence”, a phrase coined by Yuval Noah Harari to demonstrate that this creation is a not an artifact, but a new being. Levy contends with this new “other” threatening to supplant human mentation and offers an analysis of our uniquely human drive to innovate.

The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive is a meditation on a technology that manifests all the hallmarks of human relating, human needs, and human complexities in its interactions with another subject. Amy Levy’s approach applies the psychoanalytic clinical attitude, with its sensitivity to enactment, into the investigation of AI. She makes use of her encounters with AI via media, research, personal usage, and traces woven into her day-to-day relations with people to apprehend the essence of what humanity is enacting. Levy retains an inquisitive, factual stance while noting her emotional reactions, using such tension to best perceive the Other. The New Other contains compelling accounts of her direct engagements with artificial intelligence and intriguing new ideas, such as the concept of the smartphone as “cult groomer”. Levy uses a Bionian framework to chart AI transformations of human sensory experience. Leaning on Freud’s life and death drives, she discusses how the potential and dangers of AI are inseparable from the potential and dangers of human beings. This intelligent book is our guide to a future of unprecedented psychological complexity.

Order Online: www.karnacbooks.com
Order via Email: [email protected]

Register for the OPUS Book Launch:
Susie Orbach in conversation with Amy Levy

January 18, 2026 @ 12:00p – 1:00p EST

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/3Nw7vP2-REOy4d-MyFn8iw#/registration

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Karyne E. Messina, EdD, a member of APsA’s President’s Commission on Artificial Intelligence, a contributor to The CAI Report, a psychologist and Supervising  and Training Analyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis in private practice in Chevy Chase, Maryland, has written a new book published by Routledge coming out in February 2026:

Using Psychoanalysis to Understand and Address AI Bias: Refractions in the Digital Mirror
126 Pages | SBN 9781032959146

In Using Psychoanalysis to Understand and Address AI Bias: Refractions in the Digital Mirror, Karyne E. Messina uses a psychoanalytic lens to explore the subconscious forces driving AI development.

This book provides a unique psychoanalytic framework for understanding how AI systems internalize and amplify the unconscious biases of their human creators. Through detailed case studies in clinical healthcare, predictive policing, and automated hiring, Messina introduces concepts such as projection, splitting, and projective identification. She illustrates how these psychological mechanisms – originally developed to explain human behavior – are inadvertently built into the logic of AI, creating systems that replicate societal inequities on a massive scale.

Using Psychoanalysis to Understand and Address AI Bias will be of interest to all readers interested in how AI can benefit from psychoanalytic insight, including psychoanalysts in practice and in training, and academics and scholars of AI ethics and technology policy.

Available for pre-order on February 18, 2026. Item will ship after March 11, 2026