In “My Teddy, My AI, and Me,” I was trying to understand what is at stake in this singular relationship we maintain with a machine that answers us. I amused myself, a little ruefully, by my fear of looking foolish in front of Claude, by my desire to submit an idea to him that would satisfy him. I knew well that there was nobody on the other side. That didn’t prevent me from weighing my words: saying hello, offering thanks, taking precautions to express a disagreement. Since then, the reading of That Was It or Die by Thélyson Orélien has led me toward another facet of the same vertigo. It is no longer merely the interlocutor I imagine behind a reply, but the author I seek behind a text.
The book is formidable. Its writing is powerful, it plunges us into the heart of the emotions it narrates. I have the sense of reading a text written with blood and tears, a text that does not lie. Then the suspicion of a recourse to artificial intelligence interposes itself between the book and me. Orélien denies it. I am not able to settle the question of the conditions of its writing, and my reader’s unease cannot serve as proof. But it is there. Reading these pages, imagining that a machine, in which neither blood nor tears flow, could have produced the words, plunges me into an abyss of perplexity.
What is happening? The sentences have not changed. What they recount has not changed either. Yet, something unravels in my reading. Where I believed I would meet someone, I begin to search for a method. Where I received a pain, I examine its formulation. And I no longer know very well whether the book has lost its presence or whether it is I, warned by suspicion, who can no longer lend it to me. I recall Hector’s tirade in The Trojan War Will Not Take Place by Giraudoux: “You know, when you discover that a friend is a liar? Then everything he says sounds false, even his truths…”
An Emotion Seeks a Body
This “sounding false” runs through all of my practice as a psychoanalyst. All day long I listen to narratives soaked in blood and tears. Griefs, breakups, fears, anxieties of abandonment, deaths of children or parents, the pains of exile, relationships that tear apart. All day long I am in a bath of suffering that searches for its words, groping to be heard. Sometimes the narrative is there, precise, ordered, while the emotion remains inaccessible. It does not circulate. It seems blocked, encysted, split apart.
Here is a very simple scene, as it might unfold in my office. A patient speaks of a childhood memory. He is eight years old. He stole money from his father’s wallet to buy himself a candy. His father questions him. He feels fear, he feels shame, he denies the theft. The father yells, slaps him, tells him he cannot bear having a thief and liar as a son, threatens to put him in a boarding school. The child is terrified. This memory belongs to a procession of similar scenes that pepper his early years.
The patient offers me his account with a slight ironic smile, not very aligned with what he is recalling. The facts are terrible, but they seem to unfold at a distance from him. I propose that he lean back well into the back of the chair, feel his feet on the floor, pay attention to his breathing, go inside himself. A very simple hypnotic exercise. Then I ask him to recount the scene again.
He begins in the same way. Little by little, his voice becomes thick, hesitant. It aligns with what is replayed in his body. He bursts into tears, then is overwhelmed by anger and distress. The childhood scene makes sense, or rather it takes on a body. He has not found an additional fact. He can now feel what he could only tell until then.
On my side, I do not receive merely information. Something reaches me, alters my listening, my posture, the way I respond to him or fall silent. What circulates between us, what agrees and disagrees, what adjusts, is the fabric of care. The emotion does not become true because I certify its authenticity. It finds, in this encounter, the possibility of being recognized.
What Resonates Between Us
Like everyone else, I have experienced lovesickness, losses, mourning, despair and frustration, joys and anger. These experiences do not give me direct access to those of my patients. It is by no means a matter of projecting myself into them or confusing their history with mine. I am not them, they are not me. But this sensory and emotional circulation is my compass for tuning into their inner world.
What the therapist feels does not belong exclusively to his own history, nor to an emotion of the patient that would settle into him without transformation. It arises in a relationship in which each party participates. We must welcome this felt sense, but also question it. My sadness, my boredom, my impatience can teach me something about the encounter; they can also lead me astray if I take them for a truth about the other.
Freud mistrusted the countertransference, that influence of the patient on the analyst’s unconscious sensibility. He saw it as an obstacle to work, which demanded the therapist’s personal analysis. It is with Ferenczi, and with the later developments of psychoanalysis, that the analyst’s experiences could be considered a resource for the cure. Family therapies, for their part, gave central importance to resonance: the therapist belongs to the system he helps to transform.
This shifts the question of truth. Without abolishing the difference between facts and inventions, without rendering indifferent what actually happened, the therapeutic work leads us to listen to another form of accuracy. A voice sounds right or wrong, in a musical sense. The wrong note does not merely deviate from a score: it breaks a chord, an tuning between the one who speaks and the one who listens.
And this tuning is not a harmony without accidents. It includes the tremor in the voice, the contradiction, the reversal, the slip, the unspoken. It seeks itself. Sometimes I hear incorrectly. The patient corrects me. We disagree, then try to find each other again. The exactness is not given once and for all; it is worked out between us. The body informs us as much as the signifiers that circulate in language. Memories are not merely traces of the past: they reinvent themselves in the encounter of two subjectivities.
The Words of Others
A novel is certainly not a psychoanalytic session. The writer is not seated in my office, and he does not alter his sentences according to what they produce in me. Yet this absence does not prevent the meeting. For centuries, readers have entered into resonance with the emotions of strangers, sometimes dead long before their birth. It suffices to open a book for a voice to reach us.
Should a good writer have lived through everything he writes about? Must one have lost a child to write that mourning, must one have been raped to describe that nightmare? Of course not. Literature would be very poor if it were limited to inventories of our experiences. We have known separation, the pain of loss, fear, shame. We can imagine from there, shift our felt experiences, approach what we have not lived. With the caveat that the Other never becomes entirely us.
We have also read. Long before machines, we learned to recognize our feelings in the words of others. Who has not borrowed, in a love letter, a phrase found in a novel, a poem, a song? Borrowed words do not necessarily render love less sincere. They can give it its most precise form. We take them back because they have entered our flesh, because they have come to live inside us. They have been incorporated.
It is here that the question becomes difficult. If an AI offers me a sentence and I recognize myself in it, if it helps me express what I could not formulate, why would that feeling be false? I was already asking the question about metro lovers who entrusted their messages to ChatGPT. The machine can provide the words; someone can choose them, take them up again, address them. This choice engages the one who speaks. Borrowing does not necessarily erase presence.
Thus it would be too simple to split texts between inhabited human words and machine-assisted words that would be empty. The question also concerns what we do with this help. Does the formulation allow us to approach our experience? Or does it prevent us from traversing what in this experience still resists words? I fear, especially for the youngest, that this help becomes a way to avoid that crossing, until words detach from what their body feels.
Perfection and Suspicion
In my reading of Orélien, I ended up feeling something of that order. Each word seemed to sound right, each expression sharpened, each pain finding its accomplished formulation. I perceived in the background the thousands of emotions expressed for centuries by authors who, with their sweat and their tears, had told thousands of stories. I pictured a machine fed on these texts, capable of mixing them and spitting them out to rebuild their effects.
But that machine was also in my imagination. I must acknowledge it. I did not see its work; I imagined it through what I read. The perfection that had initially swept me away became suspect. I searched for hesitations, for rough edges, for the places where a voice would have stumbled. In my quest for proof of presence, I saw only talent and mastery. I no longer felt the author. I no longer met them.
After five chapters, the book fell from my hands. It was over.
That drop raises questions as much as the text does. For a perfect sentence is not the signature of a machine, just as a clumsy sentence is not a certificate of humanity. I could start suspecting all books that touch me too well. That would be a strange way to defend literature: asking it to write badly to reassure myself of the existence of its author.
What broke may be the particular trust with which I enter a book. I do not demand that everything be true, nor that the author have traversed every trial recounted. I accept invention, borrowings, detours. But I suppose someone who dares in what he writes, someone for whom these words have stakes. The suspicion blurred this address. Behind a sentence that moved me, I no longer knew toward whom to turn.
Yet it does not erase my initial emotion. If I was touched, I was touched. What happened inside me was real. The trouble begins when I try to understand with whom, or with what, this emotion was shared. In my office, the patient and I are affected by what occurs between us. In a book, this reciprocity is delayed, imagined, sometimes impossible. Yet it remains at the heart of my desire to read: to believe that words come from someone, and that they carry something of that person’s relation to the world.
Therefore I do not know whether my reading distance me from the author or whether suspicion prevented me from hearing them. This uncertainty seems part of the experience. I can defend the place of the body, of the felt, of the encounter, while acknowledging that my own sense does not settle the matter of a text’s making.
Nounou came back to me when Claude seemed to understand me. Orélien leaves me with a more uncomfortable question: what do I expect from the one I read? Certainly words for my emotions. But also this presence that cannot be reduced to the precision of a formulation. Someone whose voice reaches me even though I cannot quite foresee it. Someone I did not yet know how to hear.