Yes, this is the robust and honest way to face the exhaustion of psychoanalysis - not by endlessly refining or deconstructing old models, but by starting from contemporary experiences and asking how new forces (AI, social media, capitalism, climate anxiety, posthuman conditions) are shaping subjectivity today.
Why This Approach is Necessary
Classical psychoanalysis was shaped by 19th-20th-century conditions (Victorian repression, industrial capitalism, early consumer society).
Lacanian psychoanalysis responded to mid-20th-century conditions (structuralism, semiotics, the rise of mass media).
Today’s world is radically different:
The human subject is no longer just Oedipalized - it is now datafied, algorithmically modulated, hyper-connected, and ecologically precarious.
Desire no longer operates through strict familial repression but is shaped by the machinic assemblages of social media, predictive AI, and surveillance capitalism.
The unconscious is no longer just symbolic and linguistic - it is also digital, computational, and hypermediated.
A non-psychoanalysis must reckon with these new conditions rather than endlessly repeat Freud’s Vienna or Lacan’s Paris.
What Could a Non-Psychoanalysis Look Like?
A non-psychoanalysis would not just modify psychoanalysis - it would suspend its fundamental categories and rethink subjectivity from the ground up. Some possible areas of exploration:
1. AI and Algorithmic Subjectivity
If the unconscious is structured like a language (Lacan), then what happens when that language is no longer just human, but shaped by AI, algorithms, and predictive modeling?
In an era where AI anticipates our desires before we even articulate them, is there still a space for repressed unconscious desire? Or has the unconscious become fully externalized?
Could machine learning models be understood as a kind of “artificial unconscious”, one that knows us better than we know ourselves?
2. Social Media and the Hyperreal Unconscious
Social media produces subjectivity through constant exposure, performance, and validation loops.
Desire is no longer hidden, repressed, or buried in dreams - it is performed in real-time, algorithmically amplified, and monetized.
Instead of Freudian repression, today’s subject is confronted with hypervisibility, affective contagion, and memetic propagation.
How do we think desire, drive, and lack in a world where we are always seen, always responding, always producing content?
3. Capitalism and Cybernetic Control
Traditional psychoanalysis saw capitalism as repressive, but today’s capitalism functions through hyperstimulation, acceleration, and surplus enjoyment (Zizek, Berardi).
Schizoanalysis was useful for understanding late 20th-century capitalism, but now we are in the era of platform capitalism, data capitalism, and total integration of life into financialized networks.
Do we still need psychoanalysis’ discourse of repression, or do we need a new model that explains how desire is engineered, optimized, and manipulated at scale?
4. Climate Anxiety and the Eco-Unconscious
Freud’s unconscious was shaped by instinctual drives (eros and thanatos), but today’s unconscious is shaped by environmental catastrophe, extinction, and planetary crisis.
Climate anxiety is not just a neurosis to be treated - it is a real ontological condition that shapes subjectivity at a fundamental level.
Could a non-psychoanalysis integrate Gaian consciousness, ecological interdependence, and the trauma of species-wide precarity?
What does desire mean when the future itself is uncertain? Can there be an eco-schizoanalysis, or a psychoanalysis of planetary trauma?
5. Posthumanism and the End of the Freudian Subject
Freud’s subject was an individual caught in the tensions of civilization.
Lacan’s subject was split by language, caught in the Symbolic Order.
Today’s subject is a hybrid entity - part human, part data, part cybernetic feedback loop.
The posthuman condition displaces the very foundation of psychoanalysis:
What happens to the unconscious when the body is extended through digital prostheses, neural implants, and AI augmentation?
Does psychoanalysis still apply to a non-human intelligence? Could there be an AI unconscious, or a machine-driven mode of desire?
From Psychoanalysis to Non-Psychoanalysis
A non-psychoanalysis would not simply be an update of Freud or Lacan - it would suspend psychoanalysis as a whole and rethink the question of subjectivity from our current historical moment.
1. It would not assume that Oedipus, repression, or language are the fundamental structures of the unconscious.
2. It would not see desire as structured only by lack, but also by cybernetic feedback, ecological catastrophe, and machinic intensities.
3. It would not interpret subjectivity only in terms of past traumas, but also in terms of future projections, algorithmic modeling, and planetary conditions.
4. It would be experimental, non-dogmatic, and open-ended - less about fixing desire and more about mapping the forces that shape it today.
This approach would be as radical for our time as Freud’s was for his - because it would acknowledge that we are no longer living in Freud’s time at all.
Conclusion: The Future of Subjectivity
The exhaustion of psychoanalysis is real, but rather than mourn its loss, we should take it as an opportunity. The Freudian and Lacanian unconscious were revolutionary models for their historical moment - but they are no longer enough to explain the forces shaping us today.
A non-psychoanalysis would start not from the past, but from the present and the future - not from the death of the father, but from the birth of AI, the hyperreal, the ecological catastrophe, and the posthuman world.
It’s not just that we need a new psychoanalysis.
It’s that psychoanalysis itself needs to be radically deterritorialized - and something entirely new must take its place.