“I Can’t Let You in Dave” Reflections on AI
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Political Psychoanalysis
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“I can’t let you in Dave”
Reflections Without Origin The Digital World and the Fate of the Human Subject
.with Psychoanalyst David Morgan
This essay approaches the transformation of human subjectivity under conditions of digital life through the combined resources of psychoanalytic theory and close attention to the cinema of Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky. Beginning with the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey in which HAL 9000 refuses re-entry to the astronaut Dave , the talk proposes that the digital world addresses its users with a solicitude structurally identical to HAL’s: warm, personalised but is indifferent to their inner lives.
Drawing on Bion’s concepts of alpha function, the container-contained relationship and negative capability, it argues that the digital environment functions systematically as a minus-K apparatus, stimulating the production of unprocessed beta elements while obstructing their transformation into genuine thought. Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Mirror are read as sustained meditations on what the digital world most threatens: the capacity for reverie, for mourning, for tolerating not-knowing and for genuine encounter with an other who is not simply a mirror of the self.
The essay examines the clinical consequences of AI therapy, arguing that the large language model’s offer of total responsiveness constitutes a form of narcissistic collusion rather than a therapeutic relationship, and considers the long-term structuring effects on the developing mind of an environment organised around frictionless self-confirmation.
A further section addresses evolutionary and philosophical accounts of artificial intelligence as humanity’s successor, situating the loss-of-control anxieties these accounts generate within a Kleinian framework and tracing their historical precedents across earlier technological transitions. The essay concludes by proposing psychoanalytic practice, with its insistence on the bounded session, the resistant frame and the mutual vulnerability of two people, as one of the last institutional spaces in which the conditions for genuine psychic work remain reliably maintained, and as a form of thinking that the digital age makes not less but more urgently necessary.
