The GAI 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. I suggest 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.
GAI, I suggest, 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 therapyworld’s cognitive behavioral therapy wing, I suggest they come just as much from the heart of the psychoanalytic enterprise.
Elizabeth Lunbeck is Professor and Chair of the Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, where she teaches courses on psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and psychotherapy. She is the author of 3 books, including The Psychiatric Persuasion: Knowledge, Gender, and Power in Modern America and The Americanization of Narcissism, and the co-editor of 4 additional volumes. She has trained as a psychoanalyst and is presently writing a book entitled The Therapist: A Short History from Freud to ChatGPT.
Time: 16 June 2026 4pm-6pm
Place: University of Helsinki, Porthania, room P673
Organisers: The Helsinki Centre for Intellectual History, The Finnish Academy of Science and Letters and The Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters
Registration: Please send an email to (stefan.nygard@helsinki.fi) by 10 June.