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Taking a cue from Joyce Slochower herself, I wanted to open this review of her latest volume, Psychoanalysis and the Unspoken, with the words of Winnicott. I hoped to quote from his paper on the goals of analysis—the one that famously opens, “In doing psycho-analysis I aim at: Keeping alive. Keeping well. Keeping awake” (Winnicott, 1965, p. 166)—but I could not remember the exact title. Was it “Aim” or “Aims”? “Psychoanalytic” or “Psychoanalytical?” With a hyphen or without? I entered “Winnicott aims psychoanalytic treatment” into Google, assuming it would provide a quick answer. I was surprised to be presented first with the following “AI overview”:1
Donald Woods Winnicott believed that the purpose of psychoanalytic treatment was to help patients:
Stay alive, well, and awake
Be themselves
Express themselves
Enjoy the analysis
Look forward to the end of each analysis
Do analysis because they need it
Talk about misinformation. I ultimately clarified that the paper in question was “The Aims of Psycho-Analytical Treatment,” first presented in 1962, but the thought-terminating glibness of this list made me grateful for the reflective book I had just read. In the face of such creeping superficiality, we urgently need scholars like Slochower, someone who has
A Google AI Overview will always be slightly different each time the same search string is submitted because of the randomness associated with generating responses from large language models. This search is representative.
A Google AI Overview will always be slightly different each time the same search string is submitted because of the randomness associated with generating responses from large language models. This search is representative.