Fear and Prompting: AI, Originary Technicity, and Colonialism.J Am Psychoanal Assoc 2026 May 09; :30651261445367. [Online ahead of print]JA
This paper examines psychoanalysts' affective and defensive responses to artificial intelligence (AI) through the lens of originary technicity, the philosophical claim that technology is constitutive of the human rather than external to it. Drawing on Freudian theory-particularly the uncanny-alongside object relations and posthumanist thought, the author argues that psychotherapy's moral panic about AI reflects a splitting of the human from the technological that mirrors colonialist Subject/Other dualisms. Prompts are explored as drive derivatives, and the dyadic engagement between user and chatbot is analyzed as a site of unconscious projection and defense mechanisms, including idealization and disavowal. The paper explores how the holding environment of the clinical frame is threatened and potentially transformed by algorithmic systems that model human subjectivity back to us. Winnicott's concept of transitional phenomena offers a less persecutory frame for understanding AI as neither wholly internal nor external, neither purely human nor purely machine. The author encourages psychoanalysis to engage with AI through countertransference awareness rather than reactivity, and to distinguish between technology as such and the capitalist and colonialist systems that deploy it.[1].
