“Artificial” Psychotherapy: The AI Therapist’s Capabilities and Limitations
🗣 AI Talks · Online · Free · Open to everyone.
“Artificial” Psychotherapy: The AI Therapist’s Capabilities and Limitations
👤 About the speaker: Prof. Dr. Elizabeth Lunbeck is a historian of psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and psychology. She is Professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University, where she teaches popular courses on psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. She is the author of The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America; with Bennett Simon, of Family Romance, Family Secrets; of The Americanization of Narcissism; and four additional co-edited volumes. Lunbeck’s current project is a book, The Therapist: A short history from Freud to ChatGPT.
📌 About the talk
The AI therapist has become a dominant figure in the psychotherapeutic landscape, embraced by the public while castigated as inferior to “the human” by many commentators and clinicians. The debate over this figure has become polarized, divisive, and highly moralized, carried out in the press, in online forums, and in therapist’s offices. In this talk, I take a less binary and more granular approach. I suggest that claims for and against today’s non-human therapists should be set against a century-long project to discipline, standardize, and mechanize the imperfect and variable human therapist, a project to which the digital therapist offers an unexpected, if contested, solution. I then look at two issues, exploring how we might understand the match (and mismatch) between what users like and what AI therapists offer before turning to the training and technique of the digital therapist. What is at stake in the current mismatches between the human and AI, and are they resolvable?
Organized by the I-PSI-TEC lab at the Universitat de València, these monthly online talks feature AI experts from different fields—computer science, psychology, philosophy, and beyond— who help us understand what is happening around us and what it means for our minds, our health, and our society.
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🎥 This session will be recorded and shared online.
📩 Questions? Contact us at ipsitecai@gmail.com