The article argues that therapeutic healing requires a genuine human relationship and understanding, whereas AI simply uses statistical correlations without consciousness or the ability to truly relate to patients.
What really heals in therapy is the relationship and the understanding this involves. AI is not a person, and will never be, which means it is forever excluded from real therapeutic change.
; it’s an emerging reality in some people’s view. Large language models like ChatGPT or Claude have completely redefined whatis capable of, and along with it, have convinced some people that the realm of counselling and therapy is soon to belong to AI. People are genuinely turning to LLMs for psychological and emotional help. It is vital, first, to demystify what AI actually does.
ChatGPT and similar technologies are not conscious, and they are not thinking . LLMs are trained on vast corpora of text to recognise and reproduce statistical correlations between words and phrases. When asked a question, these systems generate responses by predicting the most statistically probable sequence of words that might follow a given prompt. This is an extraordinary computational achievement, but it is neither is instructive here.
A person, given a set of rules for manipulating Chinese symbols, may produce strings of characters that are indistinguishable from those of a native speaker; a native speaker on the receiving end might feel communicated with accordingly. But this does not entail that the person in the room understands anything at all, nor does it entail that they are relating to the other person.
The person inside the room knows nothing of Chinese—they are merely manipulating signs—nor what is going on inside the other person. It is all completely foreign.involves knowledge and awareness of the meaning and intent of the symbols used, and relating involves the experience of interpersonal exchange. None of this is present in the experiment, and none of this is present for the LLM.
Even though such systems can produce fluent, emotionally resonant language, and so appearthey understand, they have no understanding at all of what they are “saying,” and they have no sense at all that they are relating to anyone.belongs to the natural sciences: it is objective and seeks causal relationships, generalisable patterns, and predictive models. This is the realm in which AI excels. , by contrast, is interpretive and subjective.
It involves grasping subjective meanings from within—empathically entering into another’s experiential world—“feeling into. ” This is something only humans can do. -based disciplines. While we may draw on psychological theories that rely on explanation, the essence of our work is subjective, relational, and interpretive.
Understanding, in this sense, isn’t a mode of information gathering or a type of explaining ; it is a mode of being and relating . It requires emotional andis, what loss feels like, and so on. AI, by its very nature, is incapable of this.
The point of understanding, unlike explaining, is that it opens up a mutual, shared experience between people at a kind of depth — and it is this,Once we recognise this, it also becomes clear that understanding is inseparable from embodiment. Human beings are not, despite what those enthusiastic for AI therapy may believe, disembodied information-processing systems. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty famously argued, “the body is our general medium for having a world.
” The world becomes meaningful to us only because we encounter it as embodied beings situated within it; without embodiment, there is no world or others in the human sense, only data devoid of significance. We need bodies to understand: to understand involves being able to feel, to sense, and to exist as a living body in contact with other living bodies in a shared world.
puts it like this: “Human intelligence, thinking, and knowing derive from unquantifiable intangibles… the unique amalgam of being alive in our bodies in a time and place, cognisant of our inevitable mortality, and in relationship to others and they with us. ” AI, lacking embodiment, is fundamentally excluded from this mode of existence, and, as such, to the very conditions of what is central to counselling and psychotherapy.
The last point I wish to make—and one that represents the nail in the coffin for AI therapy from a humanistic and relational perspective—is the central importance in therapy of one of our most deeply human capacities: the capacity to err, to fall short, to not care, to be misattuned. In other words, our imperfection, incompleteness, and our limitation. , Donald Winnicott , famously said, “The patient makes use of the analyst’s failures. Failures there must be.
” . Elsewhere, he wrote, “I think I interpret mainly to let the patient know the limits of my understanding” . Similarly, Carl Rogers , a central pillar in humanistic counselling, said, “I believe it is the realness of the therapist in the relationship… the person who is able openly to be himself at the moment… is the effective therapist. Perhaps nothing else is of any importance.
” What heals in this sense is not perfect attunement or explanatory precision, even if this were possible in any real sense. On the contrary, healing often emerges precisely where certainty, understanding, and attunement begin to break down.
It is through the shared negotiation of difference, limitation, rupture, and repair that we find each other—and in therapy, the client finds themselves—not just in presence, but in spite of presence, when it fails and falls away, and we have to grow in the space that remains. Ultimately, the question is not whether artificial intelligence can convincingly imitate therapy; it already can. The question is whether therapy is about the kind of thing that AI can do; it is not.
From a humanistic and relational perspective, it is an encounter between embodied, vulnerable, finite human beings who meet one another within the limits of their understanding and relating that does the real work. AI cannot do this, and will never be able to do this, not because it lacks sophistication or complexity, but because it lacks personhood. It has no body, no past, no fears, no hopes. It does not long or desire, and it does not suffer.
In short, it is not—and can never be—a person. We must not be seduced by the illusion that technological mimicry is equivalent to human understanding and relating. What heals is not what therapists say or do for their clients, butJames Barnes, MSc. , MA,Self Tests are all about you.
Are you outgoing or introverted? Are you a narcissist? Does perfectionism hold you back? Find out the answers to these questions and more with Psychology Today.
AI Therapy Mental Health Llms Psychology
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Hantavirus cruise ship stranded as sick crew await evacuation; human-to-human transmission suspectedPatrick Smith is a London-based editor and reporter for NBC News Digital.
Read more »
Hantavirus outbreak on trans-Atlantic cruise ship raises concerns over human-to-human transmissionThree passengers have died from suspected hantavirus pulmonary syndrome on an Oceanwide Expeditions cruise ship, with four more suspected cases, including one in critical condition. The WHO is investigating a possible human-to-human transmission, as the ship heads to the Canary Islands for further epidemiological assessment.
Read more »
Rare hantavirus human-to-human transmission suspected on luxury cruise ship where 3 have diedFox News Channel offers its audiences in-depth news reporting, along with opinion and analysis encompassing the principles of free people, free markets and diversity of thought, as an alternative to the left-of-center offerings of the news marketplace.
Read more »
Suspected hantavirus outbreak may have 'human-to-human transmission': WHO officialThere are currently two laboratory-confirmed and five suspected cases.
Read more »
Human-to-human transmission suspected aboard hantavirus cruise ship, WHO saysSome human-to-human transmission may have occurred on board the cruise ship hit by a hantavirus outbreak that has left three people dead, the World Health Organization said Tuesday.
Read more »
Hantavirus Outbreak: Experts Weigh In On Threat as WHO Suspects Human-to-Human SpreadThree people have died and several others are ill as health officials investigate the hantavirus outbreak on the MV Hondius.
Read more »