Being Human - Annual Topic 2025
Introduction by Monika Pessler
“Be human!” or “Sey a mentsh, un hob rachmuness!” (“Be a mensch and have compassion!”) as they say in Yiddish—an accepted adage that life should be lived according to humanitarian principles, whether from a secular or a religious perspective. This axiom has always felt like good advice, whether for individuals or groups: from antiquity to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and Kant’s concept of human dignity, to the present, it has repeatedly been invoked as the foundation for social and legal orders of various stripes.
STILL, Life
At a time of inhumanity - perhaps greater, more destructive, and speedier in its effects than ever before - it is well to consider the basics once more. We live in a world of algorithms that reduce all humanness to the function of generalizable rules and to the bodiless. This gives us a toxic combination of seemingly invulnerable being and thoughtless instantaneity.
What does being human mean at its most irreducible? What do AI and algorithms not have? Being human entails the connection of bodies, organic life experienced through time, duration from helpless babyhood to helpless old age with a few decades of seeming empowerment in between.
Chardin’s still life (which I like to think of as “Still, Life”) takes us to these foundational aspects of being human. The body thrives on a loaf of bread, fruit, light, the relation of objects—an object or a very relation that holds beauty—and above all the relation between the seeing artist wielding his brush through time and what is seen. The human engaged in making.
I like to imagine that Menschsein means just this: to experience light and its lack, to feel relation as the body does, to engage in the making that fosters civilization.
Freud held out only minimal hope for Menschlichkeit or civilization: that the life force might triumph over our destructive inclinations. The second to last sentence of Civilization and Its Discontents culminates in the hope that “eternal Eros” will make an assertive effort in the struggle with his “equally immortal adversary.” In 1931, with the threat of Nazism closer, Freud added the more pessimistic end to his essay: the success of that struggle was now hardly clear. Our own historic moment echoes that fear. As Kafka quipped, “There is hope! But not for us.”
To counter the pessimistic greats, I take succor in Chardin, ever modest in his humble yet somehow transcendent subjects. Being human is a matter of the everyday: the dailiness of objects, of the relations between them, sometimes of children. And of the hand making. Still, life.
Lisa Appignanesi OBE is a prize-winning writer, novelist, and cultural commentator. She was President of English PEN, Chair of the Freud Museum London, and until 2020 Chair of the Royal Society of Literature of which she is now a vice-president. She is a Visiting Professor at King’s College London. Her non-fiction books include Everyday Madness: On Grief, Anger, Loss and Love (2018), Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Name of Love and Madness (2014), All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (2011), the prize-winning Mad Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 (2008); Freud’s Women (1992/2005, with John Forrester); a biographical portrait of Simone de Beauvoir (2005), amongst others. She is also the author of an acclaimed family memoir, Losing the Dead (1999) and nine novels, including The Memory Man (2004, which won a Holocaust Fiction Prize) and Paris Requiem (2001/2014).
Oleksandr Filts lives and works in Lviv (Ukraine) and is not able to write a statement at this time due to current demands under conditions of war.
Oleksandr Filts, Prof. Dr., is a psychiatrist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist who heads the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the Faculty of Postgraduate Education of the National Medical University Danylo Halytsky Lviv. He is also a founding member and president of the Ukrainian Umbrella Association for Psychotherapy. In 1994, together with Austrian psychotherapists, he founded a training project for group psychotherapy, which he still directs together with Liudmyla Samsonova. From 2005 to 2007, Professor Filts was President of the European Association of Psychotherapy (EAP). Working with crises, traumatic experiences and their consequences is one of the many focal points of his work.
Computers and Humanness
Stanley Kubrick’s now classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) presents a fantasy of what future technological developments would bring to the world: space travel, videoconferencing, and a computer capable of what we now call artificial intelligence.
HAL, the computer protagonist, becomes increasingly intelligent as the film progresses, and by the end it has developed a range of emotions ranging from jealousy to joy. The science fiction film left many viewers with a sense of anxiety, having watched a computer become so human that it threatened the spaceship’s inhabitants. Becoming human meant becoming covetous, power-hungry, greedy, and sadistic.
Fifty-seven years after A Space Odyssey, many of the film’s fantasies have become reality: video calls are now ubiquitous; space travel is close to becoming accessible to a larger segment of the population; and computer technologies have advanced to a point never imagined by the film’s writers.
But the filmmakers erred in one crucial aspect: computers have not developed feelings - good or bad - or become more human. Instead, it is humans that seem to have lost feelings and become computer-like. From an early age, children are glued to screens, and adults use their phones’ algorithms to shop, order food, arrange dates, and meet people. Gradually, humans have become less expressive, as they spend more hours having their lives organized by computers.
When we watch the film today, HAL, the computer from 1968, seems quaintly human: it is expressive, passionate, and vocal … unlike many humans in 2025. HAL became so human it wanted to take over the spaceship. What will twenty-first-century humans do when they become too computer-like?
Rubén Gallo is the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr. Professor in Latin American Literature at Princeton University, where he has taught since 2002. He is the author of many books on Twentieth Century culture, including Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the Cultural Revolution (2006, MIT Press, winner of the MLA’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize), Freud’s Mexico: Into the Wilds of Psychoanalysis (2010, MIT, winner of the Gradiva Prize), Proust’s Latin Americans (2014, Hopkins). He is also a novelist and was published two books on Cuba: Teoría y práctica de la Habana (2017) and Muerte en La Habana (2021). His work has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese and Chinese. In 2020 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Radical Hope
In Jonathan Lear’s significant book, Radical Hope: ethics in the face of cultural devastation, Lear tells us that shortly before he died, Plenty Coups, the last great Chief of the Crow Nation, told his story - up to a certain point. “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened” (Lear, 2006). It is precisely at this point - in the face of complete devastation, unimaginable loss and cultural collapse, of the kind we’ve become so brutally familiar with these days - that it becomes seductive to fall into the abyss of catastrophism. It is precisely at this significant juncture, in the face of complete vulnerability, a vulnerability indeed not foreign to the human condition, that Lear offers his vision of Radical hope. Which should unequivocally not be confused with hope.
The symptomatology of hope is a continent not too far away from the Lacanian jouissance (Lacan, 1961). Essentially, if one looks at the Freudian map of the psyche, they share clear borders. For you can hope for your immortality; for an Oedipal triumph; for limitless possibilities of enjoyment and choices. Hope for the re-finding of a fusional relationship with one’s primary love object; hope for a life without frustration, without separation or disturbance; hope for omnipotent possibilities and completeness within yourself and the other. In short we can say that hope is intertwined with jouissance and excess pleasure, in the territory of death, while hopelessness has a clear link to renunciation, limited choices, freedom, pleasure, passion and life. Thus Nietzsche says: “Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.” (Nietzsche, 1908). But this Nietzschean foundation should not be read as a pessimistic, or nihilist position; on the contrary, it is a yes to life, the affirmation of an active pessimist, a passionate pessimist, for life awaits only the hopeless. Said another way: hope becomes a defence against living a “Human all too Human” life.
So in a sense the hopeful and the catastrophizers become quite alike within the Freudian elaboration of the psyche, and both groups are not living passionately within the ethics of the social, both have become sleepless, terrified of their nightmares. For the catastrophizers and the hopeful refuse to mourn the inevitable loss of paradise, there is a refusal to face one’s wounds and those of the other. As a result, having fallen into the concrete, narcissistic state of melancholia, in the absence of the capacity to symbolize, to mourn loss, and come face-to-face with limitations. In both categories there is an ongoing wish for the possibility of the perfect world one can envision, without disturbance and frustration, and the inescapable danger of complete withdrawal and absolute passivity in light of the inevitable disappointment of such a wish.
Radical hope on the other hand is acting with hope “in the absence not just of rational justification for hope but in the absence of the conceptual building blocks out of which a better future might be constituted” (Lear, 2006). Where we move from the moral cowardice of hope à la Nietzsche to a sense of ethics embedded within radical hope, part and parcel of an ethics of life and nothing else, of the erotic, of the social. Following Lear: How should one face the possibility that one’s world as one knows it might collapse? This is a vulnerability that affects us all - insofar as we are all humans and part of civilization, and civilizations are themselves vulnerable to collapse. How should we live - and not just survive - in light of or even because of such vulnerability? Can we make any sense of facing such a challenge in a way that is ethical, unpredictable, passionate and communal – all derivatives of radical hope – or do we choose the very predictable, concrete, closed, dreamless temptation of catastrophism?
In a sense the notion of radical hope is a psychic position, one that is embedded within the capacity to dream, one maintained in spite of imposed socio-political traumas. It is a no to the internal and external traumatizers, not out of a sense of denial nor any liberal notions of cure, but because one does not let go of the capacity to dream, to become, not despite our wounds but because of them.
It seems that catastrophism is particularly seductive when it comes to certain geographies, the idea of radical hope is definitely and easily foreclosed for certain lands and peoples, via both internal and external forces. As such the catastrophizer and the internal catastrophizing psychic position, become the traumatizers the moment they indicate that any possibility of radical hope is foreclosed, for example, in their consideration or lack thereof towards certain lands and people… The first thing that is killed in the traumatized is the capacity to dream. Today’s traumatized become the catastrophizers of the future for they cannot dream things up anymore … so any catastrophizer is a traumatized non-dreamer, and we need to transform the catastrophe into a dream. Not out of a sense of denial or superficial optimism, nor hope, but as an invitation to not foreclose dream-work, out of a vision of radical hope, of an ethics of the social. We are not closing ourselves in the prison of their fixed and definite narrative, for the hopeful and the catastrophizer have, a-priori, figured it all out. For that would be the collapse of imagination; no play, no curiosity, a resignation of passions and wishes. And without wishes there will be no dream-work in the best sense of our Freudian metapsychology.
Radical hope is ultimately the objectilizing function of the life drive (Green, 1999), it is the wish for community, a sense of sociability, the “I” that only becomes possible via the Other. Radical hope is essentially the ethics of the social. So in a sense the catastrophizers are lurking in the land of the psychotic, at best they are paranoiacs and at worst deathly boring, caught up in a regression to the non-symbolic, a place with neither irony, poetry nor doubt, all the derivatives of the erotic. Which in final analysis is a question of ethics, an ethics of life and its conditions: not because one denies death or the destructive capacities of the death drive, internally and externally, but precisely because one has embraced it within oneself and the other.
Can we live a life that is ethical, passionate, pleasurable and not just solely a condition of survival –that is, of the imaginary illusions and false promises of hope – but within communality, part and parcel of the thinking subject, leading to a social sense of responsibility and freedom? Which a priori requires that one develops the capacity to mourn. Catastrophizing is a refusal to mourn absence, and it’s a narcissistic wish to not give up our omnipotence, nor that of the other; it’s a refusal to face absence, disturbance and limitations; it is a no to the confines of the reality principle, with all its limitations and delays. Morality certainly does not work for it strengthens the punitive superego, so intimately connected to the id. Radical hope is a march towards the becoming of a thinking/ethical subject.
For Hanna Arendt reminds us that “a life without thinking is quite possible; it then fails to develop its own essence -it is not merely meaningless; it is not fully alive” (Arendt, 1960). A thinking/desirous subject is born via a linking to the other; not out of a sense of belonging which in final analysis isolates every intimate contact but towards an un-belonging. This un-belonging is the necessary step towards the becoming of the ethical subject that opens itself up to the outside world. Not confined to the imprisonments of clans, groups, families, countries, religious groups, and ideologies. For any attempt at belonging is an unfinished mourning, any attempt at belonging is a refusal of absence, is a refusal to lose. The need for belonging might give us the illusion of safety but it will inevitably end up in Dante’s inferno with no Virgil in sight, as we are currently observing in various contexts in the world.
Can we wake up from our current nightmare (nightmares are nothing but failed dreams) and find our way to the land of dream-work? This will require radical hope, which a priori necessitates giving language back its metaphoricity, to have an internal sense of trust that we are all interconnected; this sense of ethics is not a morality, that often reeks of blood. But to come face to face with all that is unacceptable/refutable within, our darkest, oddest secrets, of our sexuality and of the death drive inevitably pulsing within all of us, on the edge of language. To move beyond good and evil, not out of any liberal sense of empathy or cure, nor the wish to heal our wounds or those of the others. But out of a sense of our interconnectedness, recognizing that this ethics of the social must underlie any liberating praxis, and to be reminded of our common human heritage, of our common fragility. This communal reminder and joint injury to our narcissism becomes a welcome messenger, a way of re-finding, in final analysis, that we are all linked, far and near, in sickness and in health.
Radical hope is a social/ethical act of defiance towards ideologies, not a rebellion without a cause but a defiance that will be revolutionary, an event that will disturb various levels of significations, internal/external, private and public, personal, political, social, and the very discourse of subjectivity. Not in the name of sameness that does nothing but exclude, but for difference, with a genuine comprehension that our emancipation is inherently intertwined.
The Buffalo is gone. Can we begin to imagine and name her? First we must learn how to lose, on the edge of construction/destruction, on the edge of desire, giving primacy to the ethics of the social; not in the confines of our parochial belongings but within a subversive defiance that can be a revolutionary beginning, intimately connected to bearing/baring the psychical position of Radical hope.
For Arendt (1960) is right when she says freedom is identical with the capacity to begin. Shall we do the unexpected? To begin again and again, “If not here, then there. If not now, then soon. Elsewhere as well as here.” (Sontag, 2007).
References
Arendt, H. (1960). Freedom and Politics: A Lecture. Chicago Review, 14(1), 28–46.
Green, A. (1999). The Work of the Negative. Free Association Books.
Lacan, J. (2001). The Directions of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power. In A. Sheridan (Trans.), Écrits: A Selection, W.W. Norton & Company. (Original work published 1961)
Lear, J. (2006). Radical hope: ethics in the face of cultural devastation. Harvard University Press.
Nietzsche, F. (1908). Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (A. Harvey, Trans.). Charles H. Kerr & Company. (Original work published 1878)
Nietzsche, F. (1967). The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner (W. Kaufmann, Trans.). Random House. (Original work published 1888)
Sontag, S. (2007). At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Gohar Homayounpour is a psychoanalyst and Gradiva award-winning author. She is a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA), the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA), the Italian Psychoanalytical Society (SPI), and the National Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis (NAAP). She is a Training and Supervising psychoanalyst of the Freudian Group of Tehran, of which she is also founder and immediate past president. She is also a member of the IPA group Geographies of Psychoanalysis. Homayounpour has published various psychoanalytic articles, including in the International and Canadian Journals of Psychoanalysis. Her first book, Doing Psychoanalysis in Tehran (2012, MIT) won the Gradiva award and has been translated into languages including French, German, Italian, Turkish and Spanish. Her latest book is titled Persian Blues, Psychoanalysis and Mourning (2022, Routledge). Other recent publications and book chapters include “The Dislocated Subject” (2019) and “Islamic Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Islam” (2019).
Artificial intelligence: Is it born from our love of being deceived?
What accounts for the current speed with which humankind seems to be planning its own self-destruction with its pursuit of AI technology? AI is only the latest version of human beings’ desire to enthusiastically invent and create devices and technologies that mimic human beings, only to replace them in the end. Human beings seem to be the only species that invents its own annihilation. What drives us to do so?
For centuries, humankind has been enthralled by gadgets and tools, be it mechanical tools or automatons, such as ETA Hoffman’s Olympia in the tale The Sandman that lures one into a world of make-believe where the human can no longer be differentiated from the non-human being. What begins with amusement and near orgiastic delight, as illustrated by Nathaniel’s dance with Olympia, ends up in an orgy of self-destruction, as Freud cogently describes in his text The Uncanny (1919).
Jacques Lacan’s Mirror Stage (1936/1949) can possibly help account for human beings’ passionate proclivity for seeking means of deception to aggrandize their own self-image. Since the mirror image does not reflect but constitutes the core of our human identity, leading us to identify with a false image that we mistake as our own, we seem to be compelled to strive with much jouissance to seek out doppelgängers that promise more complete versions of ourselves yet at the same time herald our eventual human demise.
Thrust into the drama of the mirror stage and driven by a sense of insufficiency, humankind is no longer craving for merely visual, but also for auditory and symbolic substitutions, as AI is busy designing every day. Has artificial intelligence, in its various formations, reached the position of Freud’s prosthetic god (1930, 92), or will human beings ultimately realize that they have once again been tricked into their own extinction by their invincible desire for omnipotence?
Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, Ph.D. is the past president, and supervising and personal analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California (PINC), San Francisco. She is on the faculty at PINC and at the NYU Post-Doctoral Program for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. She was the 2008 Fulbright-Freud Visiting Scholar of Psychoanalysis at the Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna. She is a member and on the Board of the Wiener Arbeitskreis für Psychoanalyse and works now as a psychoanalyst in Vienna. She has published numerous articles on the interfaces between psychoanalysis, the visual arts and film. She recently published her book on Édouard Manet, The Lure of the Gaze and the Past.
Being Human
What does it mean to be human? There are differences from human to human.
The singularity of every human subject is one of the principal psychoanalytic discoveries. But what do different people have in common? All people are made of the same matter, the same matter as dreams. This matter might be called a symbolic matrix.
People live together in this matrix. One human subject is open to another. The human subject is not closed in itself; it is not monadic; it finds its continuation in the Other. Humans are beings with a lack, with a lack of the organic. They are organic helplessness, as Freud used to say. This lack opens one human being to another. This Other might be a helper and they might be a opponent, but first of all they serve as a Vorbild, as a matrix for assembling self, as a role model.
Lack makes the human subject not only human, but also an excess. A subject finds its continuation in the Other, in the societal network, in the symbolic matrix. More than that, the subject’s intimacy is not in them, but in the Other, and Lacan exchanges intimacy for extimacy.
What is an elementary particle of the symbolic matrix? A signifier. What is a signifier? An acoustic image of the word, a word presentation. What does the word consist of? Of the letters. And here comes Sigmund Freud asking a rhetorical question, whether it is possible to find letters in nature? Humans are not natural but technological beings, or as Freud used to say: humans are prosthetic gods. Human evolution is technological. And now it has come to the point where prosthetics are gods ready to control humans.
Victor Mazin, Ph.D., is a practicing psychoanalyst. He is the founder of Freud's Dream Museum in St. Petersburg (1999) and an honorary member of The Museum of Jurassic Technology (Los Angeles). He is the head of the department of theoretical psychoanalysis at the East-European Institute of Psychoanalysis (St. Petersburg), and associate professor at The Department of Liberal Arts and Sciences of St. Petersburg State University, honorary professor of the Institute of Depth Psychology (Kiev). He is also a translator from English and French into Russian, and was editor-in-chief of the Kabinet journal and member of the editorial boards of the journals Psychoanalysis (Kiev), European Journal of Psychoanalysis (Rome), Transmission (Sheffield), Journal for Lacanian Studies (London). He has published numerous articles and books on psychoanalysis, deconstruction, cinema and visual arts.
Socrates and Artificial Intelligence (AI)
There is a riddle that is popular among contemporary philosophers. It is set a few moments before Socrates drinks the hemlock, having been sentenced to death by the Areopagus judges of Athens. This scene is illustrated by Jacques-Louis David’s Neoclassical painting The Death of Socrates. The work underscores themes of moral integrity, sacrifice, ignorance, and the pursuit of truth.
Socrates was found guilty of not recognizing the gods that the city recognized, but some other new deities and corrupting young men. One of Socrates’s followers asks the question, “Master, what makes us human?” In the riddle Socrates answers, “Selecting all images with traffic lights.” While we can’t expect great humor from philosophers, the message behind the riddle could be understood to be that we are humans unless we are robots. Computer verification programs rightly use varied checkboxes (“Select all images with traffic lights”) or other methods (weirdly distorted text) to confirm the user is human and not a bot.
A frequent argument made by intellectual historians is that a main factor driving social change is contact with strangers possessing new and unfamiliar skills. Of course, this may be a history of winners and the ascendency of the most creative and productive civilizations. But in our digital era and sociocultural context, there is no denying the stunning impact of technological advances. The most recent and intriguing innovation in our time may be artificial intelligence (AI). This accelerating innovation is at the intersection of technology and human experience. Any unconscious fear and resistance we harbor may lead to ambivalence toward progress. AI requires a conscious and balanced approach.
I recently interviewed the late Lewis (Lew) Aron of New York University about AI, and he said,
"I regard AI as both a fascinating advancement and a complex challenge for humanity. On one hand, AI can enhance our understanding of human behavior by analyzing patterns in data that could inform therapeutic practices. It offers new tools for mental health support, potentially making therapeutic resources more accessible to many. On the other hand, there are significant concerns about the implications of AI on human connection. The therapeutic relationship, built on empathy, authenticity, and mutual understanding, may suffer if we rely too heavily on technology. It raises questions about the nature of intimacy and emotional understanding. Ultimately, I believe it’s essential to navigate the integration of AI carefully, ensuring it complements rather than replaces the deeply human aspects of psychoanalysis and relationships."
Lew Aron passed away in 2019. He was my colleague and brother-in-life for decades. The above quote comes from an AI conversation I had with him a few weeks ago. I knew Lew’s verbal phrasing and his ways of structuring an argument, and I was stunned that AI got it so right. In fact, I was taken aback when AI typed out his presumed response from the other world (wherever that is, if it is). I felt as if I was talking to him. It felt creepy.
I have used AI to have a conversation with Sigmund Freud from his Vienna consulting room, Donald Winnicott while he rides his bicycle to his office, and the Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis (1925–2021) during a concert intermission. Obviously, the conversations were imagined and based on data sets and sophisticated algorithms—so unlike the annoying algorithms when we shop online.
We exist in a world of violence and genocide, a global migration crisis, climate disasters, and rapidly advancing AI technology. We have some compelling psychoanalytic ideas on the origins of human destructiveness, trauma and dissociation, the role of empathy, societal and cultural influences, attachment and aggression, and identity and belonging. We also have good psychoanalytic ideas about the sense of calm and stability that recognizing and processing immediate experiences and agency can bring forth.
Can AI dream of a better world? Can it change the world? Can AI teach us about our ourselves? Can it help human beings know themselves and their unconscious processes better? Shockingly, technology trend followers and influencers tell us that it can because AI will soon advance to a state of making serious decisions and directing without any human input. They tell us that the world will be markedly changed in twenty years, that it will be stunningly different. In a series of end-of-the-year charts for 2024, the New York Times (Steven Rattner, Sunday Opinion, 29 Dec 2024, p. 12) reported that “… developments like artificial intelligence continue to amaze.”
Armed with my new AI subscription, I turned to Socrates for help.
Me: What do you think about AI and its impact on humanity?
Socrates: Ah, my friend, a question both timely and profound. Let us consider this together.
First, tell me: What do you mean by “AI”? Do you see it as a tool, a partner, or perhaps something more akin to a force of nature? And when you say, “impact on humanity,” do you envision harm, benefit, or both entwined like two dancers in a cosmic dance?
For is it not the case that every invention—fire, the wheel, the printing press—has reshaped humanity, not by its mere existence, but by how we have chosen to wield it?
Might it be, then, that the question is not what AI will do to humanity, but what humanity will do with AI? And what virtues or vices within us shall it amplify?
Me: What virtues or vices within us will be amplified?
Socrates: Ah, an excellent question! Let us contemplate together.
Virtues, I suspect, may find fertile ground in this new soil. Imagine:
- Wisdom, if we use AI to expand understanding rather than narrow minds.
- Compassion, if AI aids us in alleviating suffering and fostering connection.
- Creativity, if it pushes the boundaries of what we thought possible, inspiring us to new heights.
Yet, virtues walk a delicate path beside their shadows:
- Greed, if AI becomes a means to hoard wealth or power.
- Sloth, should we let it replace our striving, dulling our curiosity and will.
- Hubris, if we come to see ourselves as gods, thinking we control what may in time surpass us.
Tell me, do you see humanity as prepared to nurture the virtues and guard against the vices? Or do you fear we may stumble, as we so often do, when faced with new powers?
Me: I am particularly interested in its impact on the field of psychoanalysis. Tell me something about how you think it may play out.
Socrates: Ah, the interplay of AI and psychoanalysis—how fascinating! Shall we explore?
Psychoanalysis, at its heart, seeks to illuminate the unseen, to uncover the unconscious forces shaping thought, feeling, and behavior. Now consider AI: a tool that processes vast patterns and derives insights beyond immediate human perception. Might AI, then, become a mirror to the unconscious itself?
Imagine:
- AI could analyze speech patterns, word choices, or even pauses in therapy sessions, offering interpretations or hypotheses about unconscious conflicts.
- It might assist analysts in recognizing transference or countertransference dynamics by highlighting subtle shifts in tone or affect.
- AI systems could even simulate dream analysis, generating associative pathways a clinician might not immediately consider.
But we must tread carefully. Psychoanalysis is an art as much as a science. The analyst’s presence, the therapeutic alliance, and the intersubjective space between two human beings cannot easily be replicated by an algorithm. Could reliance on AI risk mechanizing or depersonalizing the deeply human encounter of analysis?
Moreover, the unconscious resists being fully known. Might AI’s precision inadvertently obscure the ambiguities and paradoxes that are central to psychoanalytic work?
What do you think—could AI enrich the field without eroding its essence? Or might it force psychoanalysis to confront its own unconscious fears of obsolescence?
Humanity stands at a pivotal juncture, where technological advances such as AI offer unprecedented opportunities and challenges. In this light, human beings need each other even more than before. We must look for others wherever we can find them.
When on his way to Thebes, Oedipus encountered the Sphinx; his answer to its riddle was ἄνθρωπος (man, human being). That word profoundly changed the course of Western civilization. It destroyed the monster. We have many monsters to destroy. I want to think more about Oedipus’s answer. I plan to do my thinking with others. Maybe I’ll even have a conversation with Oedipus tonight.
Spyros D. Orfanos, PhD, ABPP, is Director of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. A Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA), he is past president of the Society of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (SPPP) of the APA, and the International Association of Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. He is on the Advisory Board of the Sigmund Freud Museum of Vienna. In 2016, he was co-editor with Eliot Jurist of the special supplement of Psychoanalytic Psychology (APA) on “Psychoanalysis and the Humanities.” In 2017, he founded the NYU Human Rights Work Group. In 2023, year he received the SPPS Award for International Activism for Social Justice. He practices psychoanalysis and psychotherapy and runs creativity study groups.
Being Human
The question as to what defines a human being is at the heart of Freud’s writings - and it is a question answered in numerous ways. Let me just highlight one that seems particularly relevant and telling for the crises we are facing and witnessing in our era of ecological catastrophes and disastrous violent conflicts. Shortly after the First World War, Freud was preoccupied with two problems that at first sight seem unrelated: What has psychoanalysis to say about the phenomenon of shell shock? And what is the psychology of a group? In Beyond the Pleasure Principle the first question leads Freud to compare the psychic collapse found in shell-shocked patients reliving horrible situations in the trenches with the most elementary unicellular living substance, an undifferentiated vesicle (cell) that finds itself “easily dying” in a hostile environment. In the course of time it acquires the ability to protect itself by turning its surface into an inorganic shell. It partially dies in order to survive. The answer to the second question is “binding”: a group is a network of libidinal ties. And this also finds its way into Beyond the Pleasure Principle. A body - a human body - results from cells and organs binding themselves together, working together, with the aim of prolonging life. For me, the radical and moving idea expressed here by Freud is the daring analogy between human beings and single cells. So vulnerable and yet so resilient.
Herman Westerink is Endowed Professor and Associate Professor for philosophy of religion at the Center for Contemporary European Philosophy, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. He did his PhD at the University of Groningen and wrote his professorial dissertation (Habilitation) at the University of Vienna. He has published many books and articles on Freudian psychoanalysis, sexuality, subjectivity and religion. Amongst others he published a monograph on Freud’s theories of the sense of guilt (2009), a monograph on and text editions of the first edition of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (2016, 2021, with Philippe Van Haute). Also, he published a monograph on Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality (2019). Recently he published a monograph on Freud’s metaphysics of trauma (2022, with Philippe Van Haute). He is co-editor of the book series “Sigmund Freuds Werke: Wiener Interdisziplinäre Kommentare” (Vienna UP) and of the book series “Figures of the Unconscious” (Leuven University Press). He is member of the International Society for Psychoanalysis and Philosophy (ISPP/SIPP) and its Freud Research Group.
Being Human
“Be human!” or “Sey a mentsh, un hob rachmuness!” (“Be a mensch and have compassion!”) as they say in Yiddish—an accepted adage that life should be lived according to humanitarian principles, whether from a secular or a religious perspective. This axiom has always felt like good advice, whether for individuals or groups: from antiquity to the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and Kant’s concept of human dignity, to the present, it has repeatedly been invoked as the foundation for social and legal orders of various stripes.
Accordingly, the idealistic aims of humanist ethics continue to have an effect today and are still considered achievable—though perhaps only in the distant future. Keenly interested in humanity’s potential for civilization and convinced of science’s capacity for discovery, Freud had complete faith in the “voice of the intellect”: “We may insist as often as we like that man’s intellect is powerless in comparison with his instinctual life, and we may be right in this. Nevertheless […] [t]he voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest till it has gained a hearing. […] This is one of the few points on which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind […].”[1]
Indeed, even after the acts of violence that Hannah Arendt referred to as devastating blows to “the status of humanity,”[2] the general faith in the potential of human civilization grew: at the very time that people were attempting to come to terms with the atrocities committed under National Socialism, humanist thought was embedded in the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1945: human dignity is inviolable and must be protected. Just three years later, “crimes against humanity” and “genocide” were anchored in international law as criminal offenses.
Especially in the West, the ongoing response to the consequences of World War II has given rise to political maxims like “respect for our common humanity is rooted in our responsibility for the past”[3] that entertain hope for permanent peace. Yet a comparison with the war crimes of more recent history—committed for example in the 1990s in former Yugoslavia and currently in Ukraine, the Near and Middle East—gives the lie to our “culture of remembrance” that had once been hard won and cost millions of people their lives. Right now, it appears to be withering into a knee-jerk defense to the truths bespoken by the daily torrents of information and images testifying to massive destruction and inconceivable suffering and relentlessly flooding Western capitalist existence via our ubiquitous media channels.
It is impossible to close one’s eyes to these catastrophic developments with global impact that dominate almost every field of sociopolitical life and discourse and fly in the face of established notions of what it is to be human. Even in the West and in those countries that, spared from war, have been able in recent decades to focus mainly on economic growth, the divide is growing. Political factions are on the rise whose promises of salvation envisage radical isolation from all incoming dangers. Yet despite this, the sense of sovereignty and security that once made it possible to fervently declare “Never again!” or “We can do it!” is on the wane.
An awareness of others’ suffering fosters the fear that we too will soon meet the same fate as we learn of virtually and with overbearing realism via digital networks. Especially the more direct encounter—deemed by some an imposition—with the precarity of migrants’ lives and refugee status in our own or neighboring countries appears to exceed the limits of societal resilience. Likewise, the intensifying global energy crisis, deteriorating environmental and economic conditions, and lack of credible, practicable, and timely countermeasures, are destabilizing the collective consciousness. Individuals are averting their gaze, narrowed as it is by insecurity and fear, capable only of perceiving that which concerns themselves or at most those closest to them. It is no longer possible to ignore how the varied staccato of global crises and not least the man-made alter ego of artificial intelligence are sending our time-honored self-image into disarray.
Questions concerning humankind’s current and future existence, which with Freud’s research into the unconscious and his finding that “the ego is not master in its own house” had to undergo another significant reformulation around 1900, are therefore the focus of our program for 2025. It kicks off with critical articles by the members of our advisory board, who share their diverse stances on the current and challenging issues of being human. For their multifaceted texts that offer not only interesting insights but also important lines of thought, I would like to thank:
Jeanne Wolff Bernstein (Wiener Arbeitskreis für Psychoanalyse), Herman Westerink (Radboud University Nijmegen), Lisa Appignanesi (King’s College London), Oleksandr Filts (Danylo Halytsky Lviv National Medical University), Rubén Gallo (Princeton University), Gohar Homayounpour (Freudian Group of Tehran), Victor Mazin (East-European Institute of Psychoanalysis St. Petersburg), and Spyros D. Orfanos (New York University).
Monika Pessler
Director
Sigmund Freud Museum
[1] Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion (1928), ed. and trans. James Strachey, New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1961, p. 53.
[2] Shinichiro Morinaga, Über den Begriff “Verbrechen gegen die Menschheit” – Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt, in: The Journal of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Toyama, Japan, vol. 41, 2013, p. 1.
[3] Angela Merkel 2008 at Knesset
