The Humanistic Basis of Psychoanalytic Practice

Abstract

This essay argues that psychoanalytic practice rests on a humanistic foundation irreducible to, and of a different order from, artificial intelligence. While large language models can simulate dynamic formulations, interpretations, and even therapeutic personas, such outputs are imitative; they retrieve and recombine rather than remember or desire. Drawing on three pivotal moments in history—Plato’s Phaedrus, the Catholic confessional, and Walter Benjamin’s concepts of aura and mechanical reproduction—the essay contends that genuine psychoanalytic work emerges from embodied, mortal, desiring persons in dialogue. The soul-to-soul encounter, grounded in singularity, history, and the ever present horizon of death, cannot be reproduced or replaced by any AI system.