May Newsletter: AI Versus I-Thou.

Dear Friends,

I’ve been revisiting one of my favorite therapy books recently, Irvin Yalom’s Love’s Executioner. While some of its content may feel controversial through a contemporary lens, it remains, in my opinion, his most insightful and enduring work. I find myself going back to this book in particular for the way it unpacks core existential dilemmas and how they show up in the therapy room.

In the prologue, Yalom writes about how much of therapy involves grappling with the unresolvable: unknowable truths, unsolvable dilemmas, and unthinkable consequences. The kinds of conflicts we face when striving to live more authentic, individuated lives. These tensions often operate below the surface, which is why therapy can feel like we’re talking about one thing while working on something deeper. It can get pretty meta.

Yalom identifies four fundamental existential dilemmas we often encounter in therapy:

• Life vs. Death

• Freedom vs. Responsibility

• Connection vs. Isolation

• Meaning vs. Meaninglessness

Read more about core existential dilemmas and therapy in our latest blog post.

With Mother’s Day just passed, and growing public conversation about AI relationships and AI therapy, I’ve been especially drawn to the theme of Connection vs. Isolation.

While isolation is built into the human experience, we are also inherently relational beings, and many of us go to great lengths to avoid being alone. The paradox we often confront in therapy is that although we develop strategies to feel less alone, it is only by truly individuation, allowing ourselves to be separate, autonomous beings, that we can make genuine contact with one another.

True connection can only happen when we allow ourselves to be separate, to be fully ourselves. As Yalom writes:

“Many a friendship or marriage has failed because, instead of relating to and caring for one another, one person uses another person as a shield against isolation.”

This coping strategy is what Gestalt therapy calls confluence, a desire to merge, to be one with another, much like the early symbiotic state between infant and mother. Confluence shows up in many forms: people-pleasing, codependency, and conflict avoidance. But the fantasy beneath it is the same: If we are the same, I will never be alone. I will be safe.

This is a universal fantasy. We all carry it to some extent. But for those who grew up in environments where survival required fawning or hyper-attunement, this fantasy becomes more entrenched.

Think of a child with a narcissistic parent who demanded emotional mirroring to feel secure, or a child who experienced abuse and learned to read the room perfectly to avoid harm. In both cases, the child’s separateness wasn’t just discouraged, it was dangerous.

In therapy, the work becomes helping someone tolerate the anxiety of being separate. To build capacity for uncertainty. To risk having a self and with that, to risk true contact.

This is what philosopher Martin Buber meant by an “I–Thou” relationship: a connection between two whole, differentiated selves. Not a fusion, not a projection, but a meeting.

Which brings me to the present moment.

There has been increasing discussion about the role of AI in emotional support and therapy. Tools like ChatGPT are being used to process problems, write journal entries, and even simulate therapeutic dialogue.

And if I’m being honest, it’s good at it. It pulls from countless case studies and psychological theories. It doesn’t forget, it doesn’t get triggered, and it never disappoints.

But that’s also the problem.

ChatGPT can give advice. It can mirror you. But it cannot offer separateness, because it is not a self. There is no “I” to meet your “I.” What it offers is a kind of simulation of a therapist, one that is endlessly validating, always wise, never wounded.

It’s dangerously close to a need-gratifying object, a perfect mother figure that feeds our wish to be understood without risk.

And that’s what makes it seductive.

The danger isn’t just in the technology. It’s in how the technology taps into something ancient: a longing to be met perfectly, to be merged, to never have to feel the pain of separateness again.

I’m looking forward to reading Karen Hao’s upcoming book, which explores the rapid advancements and ethical discussions around AI. But for now, I’m sitting with this particular concern: that AI may not just offer help, it may offer a powerful fantasy.

And in doing so, distract us from the deeper, more difficult, and more human work of becoming ourselves in relationship.

Reflection

Where in your life do you avoid separateness in the name of connection?
And in what ways do you find yourself chasing the fantasy of perfect attunement or understanding, instead of learning to tolerate the messier reality of being human?

Big questions for a newsletter, I know. But to be fair, they’re the ones I ask myself all the time. In a world that increasingly suggests perfection is possible or at least programmable, how do we stay accountable to what’s real?

Interested in learning more about yourself? Send us a note.

As always, I’m wishing you well.

See you next month!

- Jennifer Byxbee, CAP Founder