The other day, while waiting for a video to play on YouTube, I was forced, by whatever algorithmic authority makes such decisions, to sit through a short ad for an app billing itself as a tool for “self-discovery” and “wellbeing”. The ad was a cutesy animation, clearly AI generated, in which a cartoon man was depicted dragging himself miserably through the motions of his day, looking cartoonishly stressed and anxious.
Over this animation played an obviously AI-generated song, in which a male voice crooned, in a smoothly soulful style, the following series of declarations: “Procrastination is fuelled by trauma response, not laziness/You keep putting things off, not because you’re lazy/You wake up tired, and beat yourself up, for not doing enough.”
As the song reached what you wouldn’t quite call its chorus, and came to its eventual crooning sales pitch – “That’s why we created [this app] /To help you break free from the cycle” – I was struck by how this weird little ad seemed to encapsulate so much of what feels cheap, hollow and predatory in contemporary mass culture. There was, for one thing, the fact that it was so clearly produced using generative AI, and was tailored to address an algorithmic understanding of me (a guy admittedly watching YouTube when he should have been working). But even more than this, it was the particular style of therapy-speak that struck me as strangely, well, depressing.
It would be hard to think of a more dispiriting characterisation of contemporary online culture than therapy slop, but it captures the particular feel of much of what is extruded through our phones into the world.
A gym near Bethlehem offers a ‘bridge between Ireland and Palestine’
Weight-loss injections: ‘Two years ago I had to use a mobility scooter, this year I am hiking’
Money dysmorphia: keeping up with the Joneses when the Joneses are keeping up with you
Indian in Ireland: I’m talked over because they don’t expect me to understand the conversation
From a quick search, I learned that I was far from alone in feeling this way about the ads for this particular app. (The app, I need hardly say, is built around an AI chatbot that offers what is loosely characterised as therapy to users.) I also learned that there are numerous such ads, each of which features an AI-generated song centred around some or other specific self-help concept – a country and western song in which a woman “singer” belts out a hook informing us that “narcissistic traits can be traced back to common patterns in early childhood”; a weirdly tuneless power ballad where a guy soulfully asserts that “porn addiction isn’t my choice/it’s how I cope with tiredness”; a propulsive but structurally incoherent pop track about how men with “unmanaged ADHD symptoms” become “nice guys”.
[ Beware of the AI therapist. It tells us what we want to hearOpens in new window ]
Watching all this stuff – an activity I no doubt undertook as a means of avoiding my own unresolved trauma or whatever – I was struck by how utterly all-pervasive this sort of language has become. It’s easy to dismiss these particular ads as just so much emotionally manipulative slop, but they are indicative of a broader trend in culture more generally: the extent to which we are encouraged to understand ourselves and each other through the concepts and categories of psychotherapy.
Like many large cultural shifts, this is not entirely a bad thing. I am not, to be clear, saying that therapy per se – or understanding aspects of one’s life through the prism of ADHD or childhood trauma – is not greatly beneficial to a great many people. There is real value in it, in a clinical setting, and I have benefited in the past from the space for self-reflection therapy can provide.
What I am talking about here, though, is the way in which the diagnostic terminology of psychotherapy has leaked out of the clinical space to the point that it has come to form a kind of totalising world view. It has become the primary language of human meaning and self-understanding.
Recent years have seen a related upsurge in online discourse around a chemical understanding of human psychology – people talking about their serotonin addictions, their low dopamine morning routines, their cortisol detoxes – as though the vicissitudes of the human condition were merely a matter of getting the hormonal balance just right.
Again, it’s not that this stuff is wrong, or even that it’s useless; cortisol is definitely a real hormone, and it’s definitely related to stress and anxiety, and it’s definitely not good to have too much of it coursing through your system all the time. But it strikes me as a strangely diminishing way to think and talk about one’s moods and emotions, about what used to be known as an inner life. (All this stuff about cortisol and dopamines seems to me weirdly reminiscent of the humoral theory that presided over ancient and medieval understandings of human physiology, whereby a melancholic disposition was explained by an excess of “black bile”, an aggressive and ambitious one the result of “yellow bile”.)
It seems to me that we are badly in need of better ways of talking and thinking about ourselves.
[ Bad therapy: ‘After some of our sessions I couldn’t go into work the next day’Opens in new window ]
Psychoanalysis, that sprawling hybrid of psychology, metaphysics, and poetry, has been responsible for its own fair share of glib and clichéd self-understanding. But even at its most strange and esoteric – Freud’s Oedipus complex, say, or Melanie Klein’s ideas about infant persecution fantasies – there was something noble and ennobling in its understanding of the human mind. For all its faults and eccentricities, it was motivated by a deep, and deeply respectful, curiosity about the human condition, and about the singularity and strangeness of individual human lives.
One reason for the increasing prevalence of neurochemical accounts of our emotional lives might be that people increasingly want easy explanations, simple diagnoses and solutions, for things that are deeply complex, even irreducibly mysterious. The great, and disruptive, insight of psychoanalysis is that however much we might imagine ourselves to be rational actors, in control of our decisions and aware of our motivations, we are in fact always acting out of a deep and irrational complex of unconscious fears and desires. That’s a frightening idea for a lot of people, including many who take it as an article of faith.
Curiosity, as the psychoanalyst and essayist Adam Phillips put it, is an essential human concern, “because it tends to undo, and dissolve, essentialisms; because it tends towards the unknown, and the potentially unknowable”. I think my suspicion of the neurochemical language of human psychology, which accounts for our inner lives through balances and imbalances of hormones, is that it forecloses a deeper curiosity about those inner lives. We should be more curious about ourselves, and too respectful of our curiosity, than to accept it.
