Algorithmic Defences Against Thinking

To read the full article go to The American Psychoanalyst here

“Since UberTherapy is a business model where therapists and consumers meet via the ‘shame machines’ of social media and online apps, the debates about therapy often slip into a popular logic that Bad Therapy = Bad Patient = Bad Therapist. This logic fuels a growing narrative about algorithmic harms, which are blamed on bad patients who think ChatGPT is their therapist and bad therapists working within this new platform economy. As you would expect for a psychoanalytically informed book written by a trade unionist, I do not believe that for the key business players in the platformization of therapy the shaming and blaming of the therapeutic labour process is unconscious. Instead, I argue that it is a deliberate attempt to silence us by disorienting and distracting us from the reality that in these algorithmic systems of work we are all set up for failure. They mis-sell the product and then we clinicians and patients blame ourselves for its failure to deliver recovery, leaving the shame of the UberTherapy business model firmly within the individuals involved. A cruelty to the next generation of therapists and their customers who over time will have no living memory of what the alternatives once were and are set to pit themselves against each other across the digital barricades.

This dynamic can be understood psychoanalytically as a form of projection. There is an idea in psychotherapy about a toilet therapist that might be helpful in understanding the inevitability of the attack that is taking place on the capacity of therapists to think within this digital context. In psychoanalytic thinking, anxiety and our defences against it are given central place, particularly our common attempts to split off and project our anxiety externally. In this model, the threat of our aggression killing off something we love, like a decent therapist, triggers a projection of the parts of ourselves we cannot accept – our ‘shit’ – into the ‘toilet therapist’ to rid ourselves of these ‘shitty’ feelings. (I might be pushing the shit leitmotif too far here, but given that we are talking about therapy that acknowledges our infant experiences of love and hate, extractions and evictions, of the ‘toilet- breast’ and the retreat into blaming mummy for everything, it is not entirely out of context.) In this way, projection does not merely relieve anxiety. It protects the system itself from being thought about.”

You can buy a copy of UberTherapy: The new business of mental health by BUP here

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