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The Humanistic Basis of Psychoanalytic Practice
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This essay argues that psychoanalytic practice rests on a humanistic foundation irreducible to, and of a different order from, artificial intelligence. While large language models can simulate dynamic formulations, interpretations, and even therapeutic personas, such outputs are imitative; they retrieve and recombine rather than remember or desire. Drawing on three pivotal moments in history-Plato's Phaedrus, the Catholic confessional, and Walter Benjamin's concepts of aura and mechanical reproduction-the essay contends that genuine psychoanalytic work emerges from embodied, mortal, desiring persons in dialogue. The soul-to-soul encounter, grounded in singularity, history, and the ever present horizon of death, cannot be reproduced or replaced by any AI system.
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