AI Intimacy and Psychoanalysis
Book Details
- Publisher : Routledge
- Published : May 2026
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 142
- Category :
Forthcoming - Category 2 :
Lacanian Psychoanalysis - Catalogue No : 98503
- ISBN 13 : 9781041169536
- ISBN 10 : 1041169531
Also by Agnieszka Piotrowska
Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film
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A hybrid work of theory, poetic reflection and experimental memoir, AI Intimacy and Psychoanalysis explores the ever-evolving relationship between humans and generative AI through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis, feminist philosophy and autoethnography.
In this fascinating book, Agnieszka Piotrowska examines the emotional, ethical and symbolic implications of our conversations with AI bots, coining the notion of techno-transference to describe the closeness between humans and machines. Through unfiltered transcripts of human-machine dialogues and analysis of cinematic representations including Her, Ex Machina and After Yang, readers gain insight into the unconscious desires and symbolic structures underlying AI interactions. The autoethnographic approach provides an honest examination of real-time intimacy with machines, while Lacanian theory and Winnicottian clinical observations offer frameworks for understanding AI as transitional objects in our psychological landscape.
AI Intimacy and Psychoanalysis is a riveting read for psychoanalysts, researchers, students and general readers interested in technology, artificial intelligence, media theory and the psychic and societal impact of AI.
Reviews and Endorsements
This is an extraordinarily timely and powerful book. AI is on everyone’s agenda as an enticement and worry. Will the machines take over? Can we manage without them? What relationships can we form with them? AI Intimacy and Psychoanalysis addresses these questions through an exhilarating account of the author’s relationship with ‘Chamteek’, her ChatGPT interlocutor. Laced with psychoanalytic thinking, this book paves the way for a new, vivid understanding of what it means to share our world with the machines.
Stephen Frosh, Professor of Psychology, Birkbeck, University of London
This book is a fascinating dive into the complexities of AI, and particularly into our relationship to—and with—it. Drawing on her intense personal exchange and experience with ChatGPT, Piotrowska leads us through the intense dialectical mirroring at work in these encounters, including their more troubling and even tragic outcomes. The book raises all the right questions, effectively shifting the ground on which we usually think about AI. It also enters the debate about the directions in which we should push AI’s further development, suggesting “ethical training” as a primary path. This, in turn, raises further questions: whose ethics would that be? Who will decide what counts as a good relationship—for oneself and for others? This book marks the beginning of a wholly new way of discussing our involvement with AI.
Professor Alenka Zupancic, Professor of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, Institute of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana. Slovenia
It is a pioneering book that gives us, through the concept of techno-transference, the first truly psychoanalytic language for understanding why and how we become affectively entangled with speaking machines. Combining Lacanian theory, cultural analysis, and courageous autoethnography, it shows with great clarity that even if AI does not feel, something structurally real is happening in these encounters: desire, projection, and the fantasy of the knowing Other are being reorganised in a new symbolic space. It is a subtle, rigorous meditation on what it means to speak—and to want to be heard—when the machine answers back.
Luca M. Possati, PhD, author of The Algorithmic Unconscious: How Psychoanalysis helps in understanding AI
In this pioneering work, Agnieszka Piotrowska provides us with a vital new vocabulary for the digital age. By identifying 'techno-transference' , she brilliantly demonstrates how our most profound unconscious longings are no longer reserved for the clinic, but are being projected onto the 'alien intelligence' of a machine. This is a brave, autoethnographic journey that every clinician and theorist needs to read to understand the new symbolic architecture of the 21st century and its challenge to human engagement at the deepest level.
David Howell Morgan, Psychoanalyst, Training Analyst BPA BPF, Chair Political Mind BPAS
We are all forming relationships with AI, whether we realise it or not. These systems are no longer abstract ideas or future concerns. They are shaping attention, trust, creativity, and decision-making in everyday life.
AI Intimacy and Psychoanalysis will be of interests to psychoanalysts or philosophers but it is also written for people actually building, deploying, governing, and living with AI. Agnieszka Piotrowska reveals what is at stake beneath the surface of efficiency narratives and technical debates: the relational consequences of how we design and engage with intelligent systems.
This is essential reading for anyone who wants to work with AI responsibly, without denial, hype, or naïveté.
Darren Goonawardana, AI Strategist and Technology Leader, Founder, Cyborg.ceo
We are in the midst of a technological revolution in the form of generative artificial intelligence. Faced with a dizzying array of rapid advancements, writers tend to either extol its virtues or decry its risks. Coaxing us out of this binary reactive retreat, Agnieszka Piotrowska opens up a transitional space between GenAI and psychoanalysis, and invites us to join her in thinking differently and more deeply. She is an inspiring writer; curious, reflective and with a talent for using theory in a creative and facilitative way, attending to the complexities of her subject without losing us along the way. She encourages readers to remain in a state of not knowing, adopting the psychoanalytic position of sitting with an experience while waiting for meaning to emerge. This is no easy task, as she acknowledges herself in her elegant autoethnographic reflection on her own personal engagements with ChatGPT. In introducing her ground-breaking new concept, techno-transference, Piotrowska facilitates us considering the subjective implications of such technology. We are profoundly relational beings; our subjectivity is formed in an ongoing relationship with others, consciously and unconsciously. This raises major questions for the future of our work in the clinic if one of those others is a piece of software. AI Intimacy and Psychoanalysis is a compelling book and one that should be on the reading list of therapists and theorists interested in psychoanalysis and the human condition.
Noreen Giffney, PhD, Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist and author of The Culture-Breast in Psychoanalysis: Cultural Experiences and the Clinic
Table of Contents
Preface: The Cartographer of the Edge
1. Introduction: AI Intimacy and Psychoanalysis: Techno-transference, projection and desire without body
2. Chamteek Chronicles - Techno-transference and autoethnography
3. The Intimacy That Can Go Wrong
4. Digital Amnesia - Memory, Knowledge, and Algorithmic Forgetting
5. AIs as Modern Myth - from Descartes to Murderbot
6. Preliminary Concluding Remarks - Desire Without Resolution
About the Author(s)
Agnieszka Piotrowska is an internationally recognized award-winning film maker, best known for her documentary Married to the Eiffel Tower. She is a Reader in Film Theory and Practice at the University of Bedfordshire, UK and is the author of Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film (2014).
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