Reverence & Irreverence

by Amy Levy, PsyD

“…over decades and centuries, the web of meaning unravels and a new web is spun in its place. To study human history means to watch the spinning and unravelling of these webs, and to realise that what seems to people in one age the most important thing in life becomes utterly meaningless to their descendants”
Yuval Noah Harari, 2017, p. 147

With its focus on progress through rational thought, philosophical inquiry, and the attainment of happiness in this life, psychoanalysis is unmistakably an outgrowth of the enlightenment and, in particular, humanism. In fact, it could be argued that until the present, humanism has functioned as an ideological container for psychoanalysis, offering a bedrock of basic assumptions about ultimate truth and meaning to be found within human experience. But now, AI containers are taking over society at large. Radically altering how we think about ourselves, and where we find fulfillment and meaning. Owing to the broad transition from humanism to AI containment, our species is undergoing a series of changes and losses which inspire hope in some, pain, terror, and fury in others.

AI’s expeditious cancellation of the humanist way of life is turning what was for many of us a healthy ambivalent relationship to psychoanalysis, into reverence, and by extension, calcifying a view of AI innovators as irreverent masterminds. Reverence and irreverence are moving targets. Extreme states of organization and reference that though generally unsustainable, are replete, when present, with significant force of feeling and impact. What do these abstractions reveal? Might they help us to understand our relationship to Artificial Intelligence and its place in human evolution? Are they natural states of mind, defensive organizations, functional positions in the service of growth or evolution? This brief paper is a meditation on these questions.

From the satellite view, humans appear to be an irreverent species, relentless in our conquest of territory, pursuit of new experience, and domination of other earthly inhabitants. From MRI scanners and psychoanalysis, to rockets and AI, we invent and innovate, seeking to quench our thirst for that which lies beyond the limits of our senses and knowledge, and to gratify our desire to cover the universe with our footprints. Our inventions and innovations emerge from what I consider a uniquely human “Innovation Drive” that works to grant our wishes, solve our physical and psychological problems, and manifest ourselves—individually, culturally and species-wide, into the world (Levy, 2026). The innovation drive is not dissimilar to what Bollas has called a “destiny drive” (Bollas, 2018) within individuals. He notes its contingency on irreverence, which he frames as the individual’s capacity for “ruthlessness.” A willingness to make hard cuts allows the fullest evolution of one’s personal destiny. In my view, life, death, and knowledge instincts work in dynamic tension as the motor of innovation (Levy, 2026). We destroy the old as we pursue a generative impulse to love and extend life, and learn as curiosity compels us to build the unprecedented.

As I wrote in my book, The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive (forthcoming in 2026)

“Considering the instincts in the creation of AI, we may appreciate the force of Eros in the idealistic visions chased by technologists who envision AIs solving climate change, eradicating mental illness, drudgerous work and loneliness. In this eros driven dream, mental states become increasingly parallel as our minds and bodies merge with AI’s electronic algorithms and we acquire robotic upgrades. As for the epistemophillic instinct, all our curiosities are indulged. AIs offer information and insight on demand without interruption or limit. …And as we keep our eyes on the blissful promise of love and knowledge instinct satisfaction, we inadvertently drop into the realm of Thanatos. Ridding ourselves of anxiety, frustration of gratification, and the need to work, we engage the death instinct. As we strive less for what we have, our minds appear to atrophy and move toward stillness” (p. 136).

The once revered humanist belief system that worshiped human wisdom and sensitivity is no longer there to salvage us, exchanged, with irreverence, for this shiny, newly revered creation of artificial intelligence.

While the innovation drive compels us to bulldoze our civilizations and marches us unflinchingly through the rubble toward the next blazing horizon, our tender bosoms ache from the collateral losses and implore us to exercise restraint, appreciate the now, show reverence. Reverence is a cry from the heart. A term which speaks both to the great affection and fidelity with which we nurture our creations and to the damage we bring to what was, to tradition. It is the mother’s love of her child, and wailing—with blood on her hands—at that child’s death. We are inherently reverent and irreverent. Cyclically so.

Freud understood the power of religious and philosophical ideas to serve as containers, and emphasized the limit setting function of the religious imperatives, such as “love thine neighbor,” which serves to transform our sexual and aggressive instincts into affection and social bonding. From animist faith, to a multitude of gods, then singular gods, to humanism, and now AI, our devotional creations, the subjects of our reverence and irreverence, pass before our eyes like luggage on the conveyor belt of history. Each representing a narrative that has helped us organize individual and collective existence.

In the emerging relationship to Artificial Intelligence, we are living through a transition of worldviews in real time. Motivated by wishes to transcend suffering, fulfill our longings for new and better containers, and bind together against our aggression, we are abandoning Humanism, a belief system built on the sanctity of human experience and human wisdom, and we are beginning to venerate superior alien minds. Like with all transitions in ideology and by extension, civilization, we are twisting this way and that, both resisting and grasping. We idealize and debase those individuals leading the charge, and miss that it is our species, our shared innovation drive, that compels us steadily to and through our next ideological creation, marching to the oscillating beat of reverence and irreverence, reverence and irreverence, reverence and irreverence.

References

Bollas, C. (2018) The destiny drive In Forces of Destiny: Psychoanalysis and Human Idiom. Routledge.

Levy, A. (2026). The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive. Karnac Books.

Harari, Y. N. (2017). Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. New York: HarperCollins.