Event Description
The generative AI therapist is rapidly becoming a dominant figure in the psychotherapeutic landscape, embraced by the public and even more intriguingly by some clinicians—if not as a licensed therapist, then as a companion, a tool with which to better understand patients, or a therapeutic ally. Elizabeth Lunbeck suggests that the appeal of ChatGPT “therapists” is to be found, in part, in their resolution of a longstanding problem for the field of psychotherapy: the analyst’s personality, which has long prompted attempts to standardize and mechanize practitioners in the interest of reliability, replicability, and the demands of science. Generative AI is the latest in a long series of innovations that not only achieves these goals but also does so in an improvisational and idiosyncratic register. Although observers routinely situate these new clinicians in the therapy world’s cognitive behavioral therapy wing, Elizabeth Lunbeck suggests they come just as much from the heart of the psychoanalytic enterprise.
Event Speaker
Elizabeth Lunbeck, Professor of the History of Science in Residence at Harvard University
Event Information
Open to Columbia University ID holders; registration required. Please email Elijah Ferrante at [email protected] with any questions.
Hosted by the History of Medicine Workshop at Columbia University.
