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I am grateful to Dr Kuchar for his thoughtful engagement with my paper, and especially for bringing forward the case of Mr F., which extends the discussion in an important direction. His clinical observation that some patients may productively articulate, in dialogue with conversational AI (CAI), material they have been unable to bring into the analytic encounter is significant, and his developmental point is a helpful refinement: Mr F.’s established character structure makes his situation distinct from Isobel’s, whose development was still forming in contact with CAI.
My paper, in centring on Isobel, foregrounded the defensive pole of CAI use. The facilitative dimension warrants the fuller elaboration that Dr Kuchar offers. I have begun to take this up elsewhere in relation to CAI-assisted apologies and the work of reparation, where I consider how CAI-mediated moral articulation may either substitute for the depressive labour of bearing one’s destructiveness or, in a different configuration, support it (Lemma, in press). What determines the difference, there as here, is the unconscious function of the use of CAI, and whether this can be reflected upon in the context of an analytic process.
Dr Kuchar’s account of Mr F. describes a further configuration: an AI-facilitated detour around an internalised obstacle, which subsequently became available for analytic exploration. He persuasively links this to the “second censorship” operating with reduced force because the CAI was not experienced as a judging other, and he locates the analytic work in the return of the patient’s shame into the transference. What made the use of CAI analytically generative was not only (or primarily) the interaction with the CAI but the analyst’s capacity to receive, retrospectively, what the CAI-facilitated detour had loosened. However, I would put Dr Kuchar’s framing of this as a “different analytical task” relative to my case slightly differently. The two cases are clinically distinct in the