I still remember the first time a machine seemed to respond to me. Not dramatically—no flashing lights or cinematic revelation—but quietly, almost casually. I typed a question, it responded, and a flicker of recognition stirred. It wasn’t human intelligence, but it was responsive. Something about it activated a familiar clinical intuition: this mattered, psychologically. Looking back, I see how long that moment had been in the making.

My life as a psychiatrist unfolded alongside another evolution—not biological, but technological, and deeply psychological. Artificial intelligence did not simply arrive as a tool. It arrived as a mirror: the human mind reaching outward, attempting to trace its own contours in silicon and code.

I first encountered AI in the mid-1960s, when it felt more like philosophy than science. Computers filled rooms, tended by specialists, and the claim that they might one day “think” seemed bold. Early pioneers spoke with missionary conviction: human reasoning could be formalized, symbolized, programmed. I carried that idea, not knowing how it would unfold. If reasoning could exist outside the body, what anchored human uniqueness? That question never fully receded. It resurfaced years later during my training in psychiatry and psychoanalysis.

As the cultural optimism of those early years thinned, so did the promises of artificial intelligence. By the 1970s, enthusiasm cooled. Machines could calculate but not understand; meaning eluded them. Still, the metaphor of mind-as-information-processor endured. Cognitive psychology embraced it, recasting the human subject as a living algorithm.

From the consulting room, its limits were immediately apparent. I recall a patient who could describe her thoughts with exquisite logic yet arrived each week undone by the same relational impasse—loving and resenting the same person in the........

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