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AI-generated video is proving to be a new tool for the "auxiliary ego" work at psychodrama's core.

Animating an old childhood photo with AI created a genuine psychodrama-style "encounter" with myself.

Speaking to my inner child yielded honest counsel on worry, love, friendship, and resilience.

There's an old photograph that opens my memoir, Confessions of a Former Child: A Therapist's Memoir. In it, I'm maybe six years old, dressed head to toe in cowboy gear—hat, chaps, bandanna, the whole sheriff-gonna-clean-up-Dodge kit—looking at the world like I already had a few things figured out. This is how I dressed on Saturday mornings back then.

Earlier this week, my wife, Andrea, on a whim, fed that photograph into an AI video tool (Comapps LLC., 2026) and asked it to imagine something that never could have happened: Me, as I am now—white-bearded, with a grandpa's worth of stories in my pocket—sitting down next to that boy on a bench. Then hugging him.

I wasn't prepared for what this did to me.

I've spent a career studying how psychodrama can facilitate hope, gratitude, and love. I know, intellectually, that "inner child work" is a real clinical tool, and that psychodrama founder J.L. Moreno (1987) built an entire method around exactly this kind of encounter—using an empty chair or a fellow group member as an auxiliary ego to stand in for a piece of the self that needs to be met, not managed.

What I wasn't ready for was how differently it lands when the auxiliary ego isn't a stranger playing a role, or an empty chair you have to imagine filling—when it's actually you. The very crease of that........

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