Artificial Intelligence and its Implications: The ChatGPT Therapist and the Inner Analyst

Presented by Elizabeth Lunbeck

• Oct 24, 2025

• 7:30 - 9:00pm ET

• Location: Virtual or In Person (NYC)

• Source/ Event Link: William Alanson White Institute

“The AI therapist is rapidly becoming a dominant figure in the psychotherapeutic landscape, embraced by the public and even more intriguingly by some clinicians—if not as a licensed therapist, then as a companion, a tool with which to better understand patients, or a therapeutic ally.

Professor Lunbeck suggests that the appeal of ChatGPT “therapists” is to be found, in part, in their resolution of a longstanding problem for the field:  the analyst’s personality, which has long prompted attempts to standardize and mechanize practitioners in the interest of reliability, replicability, and the demands of science. 

She suggests that Generative AI is the latest in a long series of innovations that not only achieves these goals but also does so in an improvisational and idiosyncratic register. Although observers routinely situate these new clinicians in therapy world’s CBT wing, they come just as much from the heart of the psychoanalytic enterprise.”