Danielle Knafo: Artificial Intelligence on the Couch: Staying Human Post-AI
Danielle Knafo: Artificial Intelligence on the Couch: Staying Human Post-AI
Sep 20, 2026 10:00 AM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Abstract
In Artificial Intelligence on the Couch: Staying Human Post-AI, Danielle Knafo examines the changing relationship between human beings and artificial intelligence through a psychoanalytic lens. The article considers how increasingly autonomous technologies challenge longstanding assumptions about human uniqueness, intelligence, agency, and control. Drawing on Freud’s account of the unconscious, Knafo proposes that algorithms may be understood as a new form of unconscious: largely invisible systems that organize information, shape decisions, anticipate desires, and increasingly mediate everyday life. As individuals externalize aspects of decision-making and psychological life through digital technologies, algorithms can function as mirrors that reflect patterns, fantasies, fears, and desires that may not otherwise be consciously recognized. The article situates these developments within a longer history of challenges to human narcissism, from Copernicus and Darwin to Freud, asking what remains distinctively human as machines increasingly reproduce capacities once understood as uniquely ours. It ultimately considers the implications of these transformations for psychoanalysis itself, including the possibility of machine-mediated therapy and dream interpretation, and asks what role psychoanalysis might assume in sustaining and rethinking human experience amid rapidly evolving technological conditions.
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