Using Psychoanalysis to Understand and Address AI Bias: Refractions in the Digital Mirror
Book Details
- Publisher : Routledge
- Published : February 2026
- Cover : Paperback
- Pages : 122
- Category :
Forthcoming - Category 2 :
Psychoanalysis - Catalogue No : 98421
- ISBN 13 : 9781032959146
- ISBN 10 : 1032959142
Also by Karyne E. Messina
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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.
Reviews and Endorsements
A sensitive, incisive, and illuminating, (albeit disturbing), take on AI. Messina deftly describes the problematic unconscious biases and societal prejudices making their way into the AI systems we rely on today. She is an expert at using psychoanalytic thinking to jostle her reader into an alert and informed stance in relation to these troublesome trends which require psychoanalytic intervention.
Amy Levy, Psy. D, Co-Chair of the Council on AI
Karyne Messina’s book on AI and Psychoanalysis offers profound insights into how inevitable biases in AI stem from unconscious projections from the minds of people who construct AI, and how these biases silently permeate every level of AI design. Understanding these hidden structures is a crucial first step towards the ethical design and use of AI in every dimension of human experience, from the intimacy of psychotherapy to the global impact of social and national policy. Messina’s sophisticated exploration of AI’s enigmas shines an essential spotlight on problems and opportunities inherent in AI’s almost unfathomable potential.
David Scharff, MD. Co-Founder and Former Director, International Psychotherapy Institute; Recipient, Sigourney Award for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis, 2021
In an age of endless AI discourse, Dr. Messina’s book, Using Psychoanalysis to Understand and Address AI Bias: Refractions in the Digital Mirror, stands apart. While others focus on the technical mechanics of AI, Dr. Messina fearlessly examines its psychological foundations, inviting us to look beyond the code and into ourselves. Her groundbreaking application of psychoanalytic concepts, particularly projective identification, illuminates why AI bias is not a bug to be fixed, but a reflection of humanity’s unconscious anxieties, prejudices and longings for connection. With remarkable clarity, the book demonstrates how our societal biases are not merely replicated but are actively mirrored and institutionalized by AI systems. This work is an essential and timely intervention. At a moment fraught with dissension and polarity, Dr. Messina provides a thoughtful framework for understanding the forces at play in our new digital reality. She shows that the path to a more ethical AI is not solely through technical regulation, but through a deeper, more profound form of human self-awareness.
Dr. Harry Gill, MD, PhD. President of HGMD, LLC, Medical Director, Embark Behavioral Health, Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, George Washington University
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
Introduction
The Problem: AI Bias in Practice
1. Understanding Projection from a Psychoanalytic Perspective
2. How Melanie Klein’s Work Can Help Us Understand and Overcome AI Bias
3. The Myth of Neutrality: AI and Decision-Making Processes
4. Mind Reading Machines: The New Intimacy of Human-AI Relations
5. The Emergence of AI Consciousness: From Scheming to Sentience
6. The AI Therapist: Healing Minds in the Age of Conspiracy
7. The Digital Siren Song: Projective Identification and the Erosion of Human Autonomy
8. Echoes of Fiction: Manufactured Realities and Mass Projective Identification
9. The Algorithmic Hand of War: Projecting Lethality onto Autonomous Systems
10. The Devalued Self: Societal Projection of Worth in an Automated World
Conclusion
Epilogue
About the Author(s)
Karyne E. Messina, Ed.D., is a licensed psychologist and psychoanalyst, and is on the medical staff of Suburban Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. She is a Training and Supervision Analyst at the Washington Baltimore Center for Psychoanalysis. Her books include Misogyny, Projective Identification and Mentalization: Psychoanalytic, Social and Institutional Manifestations and Resurgence of Global Populism: A Psychoanalytic Study of Blame-Shifting and the Corruption of Democracy.
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