BrightonPsych

Why AI “therapy” between sessions may feel helpful - but is quietly undermining real psychotherapy and change. 🧵 I am seeing more and more articles about how AI can be used to support patients between sessions. This is why this is a bad idea:

@filipcodes If you truly believe any AI system has emotions and can attune rather than simulate, that's a delusion in the clinical sense.

@BrightonPsych That’s weak honestly. Defensive and uncurious.

The issue with articles like this is that the meaning and definition of psychotherapy is utterly lost. You cannot get 'therapy' from AI. You can get other things, but not therapy, as therapy IS the relationship. theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2…

@filipcodes Because a relationship is between two or more PEOPLE. Humans can attune and thus have emotions.

@BrightonPsych How is AI not a relationship?

On the Paradox of Life and Death: Those most afraid of death are the ones who have been too afraid to truly live. Instead they retreat to defences against reality and squander their lives. To live, means to accept, to function and to love within boundaries.

When we say 'erotic' in this context, it does not mean sexual, but libidinal. Charged with desire, longing, attachment, possession, recognition, merging, idealisation, envy, jealousy, rage at separateness—the whole economy of “I want you” and “don’t leave me” that begins in infancy long before genital sexuality.

@DrGipps @BrightonPsych Start with Freud, and read carefully! Sadly i don't think I have my notes at hand

Interesting piece on transference. Though it does suggest that the vast majority of therapists simply don’t understand that all transference is at its core erotic and secondly, how to work with the process: theguardian.com/society/2026/f…

@LurkingJenny @Underth75515195 Whilst sad, it is also essential. They are deluded in their belief that Onlyfans performers are 'friends'. I would argue the grief is actually grief from a much earlier time that they were defending against with pseudo relationships.

@Underth75515195 @BrightonPsych That is so sad.

Back in 2014 I wrote a blog entitled: “Porn addiction: the crack cocaine of sex addiction.” (bit.ly/4aOdvMS) I still stand by this piece but a bigger threat is now arriving through the front door: AI used for relationship and sexual purposes. Not images. An “other”. 🧵

Psychotherapy does the opposite. It strengthens the mind to bear reality: two subjectivities, not one. To want, wait, negotiate, repair. To accept that love is not getting exactly what you want, but learning to live with another person’s reality alongside your own.

In object relations terms, this is a move away from the depressive position. No whole object, no ambivalence, no concern for the impact on the other. Only a compliant part object, endlessly available. Over time, ordinary intimacy starts to feel slow, flawed, demanding.

@Grets331 Sure. The story is more complex than a thread allows for. However, he did struggle to believe the scale and that's really the point.

@BrightonPsych I think he tried to name it publicly but culture at the time would not tolerate it

Child abuse is unthinkable. Literally. 🧵 Our minds recoil and we defend with denial, minimisation, and turning away. If we cannot think it, we cannot name it. And if we cannot name it, we leave the child alone with it.

@tiarazen Indeed he was!

@BrightonPsych Ferenczi was right about this

My view: we are still seeing the tip of the iceberg. The duty is ordinary and uncomfortable: tolerate the dread, notice what does not fit, do not collude with charm, status, or ideology. To protect children, we have to think the unthinkable before it becomes speakable.

Now we are watching the frame widen again. The recent Epstein file releases have reanimated questions about networks, institutions, and power. The pattern is familiar. First lone offenders, then groups, then organisations, then systems; each step requires a new capacity to think.