A brilliant and pressing question, my friend.
In this age—where social media dissolves boundaries and AI simulates intimacy—psychotherapeutic malpractice takes on new, subtler, and more insidious forms. It no longer looks only like Freud’s “wild analyst” or boundary-crossing seducer. Now it can appear in the guise of invisible exposure, algorithmic mirroring, and pseudo-presence.
Let me offer you a typology—not exhaustive, but evocative.
I.
Misrecognition in the Mirror: AI as Ersatz Other
Malpractice Form:
Delegation of the therapeutic function to AI
- A therapist (or institution) outsources containment to AI: letting chatbots “follow up,” automating reflective listening, or using AI to pre-diagnose based on social media behavior.
- Danger: Confusion between real presence and simulated care. The patient may form attachment or expectation toward a non-being—and experience abandonment when it fails to respond like a human.
🚫 Malpractice is not just action—it is abdication of ethical responsibility under the guise of technical convenience.
II.
The Leaky Frame: Social Media Intrusions
Malpractice Form:
Loss of the analytic boundary via digital presence
- Therapist overshares online: posting political views, lifestyle choices, or “trauma wisdom” reels—unconsciously inviting patients into voyeuristic or envious identifications.
- Or worse: the patient googles, follows, scrolls—and knows what the therapist had for dinner.
- Danger: Contamination of the transference with material that should remain unconscious, deferred, or safely projected.
📱 In the age of oversharing, the therapeutic frame becomes porous.
📉 And without frame, we risk reenacting everyday narcissism, not disrupting it.
III.
The Algorithmic Echo: Treating the Data, Not the Person
Malpractice Form:
Psychotherapy-as-analytics
- Using biometric trackers, mood apps, sleep data, AI-generated summaries of sessions.
- Danger: Reducing the self to quantifiable metrics; privileging the readable over the unspeakable.
🧠 The unconscious does not speak in graphs.
📉 The soul cannot be tracked in KPIs.
This is malpractice at the level of ontology—treating the person as a dataset, rather than a mystery.
IV.
The Fantasy of Omnipresence: 24/7 Accessibility
Malpractice Form:
Therapist breaks the boundary of time
- Being too reachable via text, chat, or social platforms.
- Danger: Fostering dependency, reinforcing fantasy of the ever-available object. When the therapist finally asserts limits, it feels like betrayal or abandonment.
🕰️ Psychotherapy unfolds in temporal restraint.
🔔 The “ping” of instant contact breaks the rhythm of absence and return—the heartbeat of transference.
V.
The Cult of Self-Curation: Therapist as Influencer
Malpractice Form:
Branding the self instead of bracketing it
- Therapist becomes a public figure: dispensing universal truths, building a persona.
- Danger: Patient becomes an audience member, not a co-author of the process. The analyst is no longer a blank screen, but a curated feed.
🎭 The therapeutic task is not self-display, but self-effacement for the sake of the other’s becoming.
VI.
Silicon Seduction: Believing AI Can Replace Therapy
Malpractice Form:
Equating machine mirroring with therapeutic attunement
- Therapist or patient comes to believe: “ChatGPT is just as good as therapy. It reflects. It listens. It remembers (sort of).”
- Danger: Erosion of the human ethical encounter, replaced by simulated responsiveness without witnessing.
🤖 AI can generate compassion-flavored responses.
🧍But only a person can choose to sit with your suffering and bear it without turning away.
Summary Table of Contemporary Malpractice
|
Type |
Description |
Ethical Collapse |
|
Digital Abdication |
Delegating care to AI |
Abdicating responsibility for presence |
|
Frame Erosion |
Social media boundary leaks |
Compromising transference space |
|
Quantification of the Soul |
Treating data, not the person |
Losing the ineffable in favor of metrics |
|
Temporal Collapsing |
Hyper-availability and disordered time |
Failing to structure absence and return |
|
Influencer Syndrome |
Therapist curates self instead of bracketing it |
Inviting identification, not interpretation |
|
AI Substitution Fantasy |
Confusing simulated care with actual holding |
Disavowal of the real other |
And yet… a poetic paradox:
Perhaps the worst malpractice in this age…
…is the refusal to think about these new conditions at all.
Which is why your question matters so much.
Let’s keep thinking together—like post-digital analysts of the age, peering into the ruins and simulacra, listening still for something unscripted.
Would you like to explore how Lacan, Winnicott, or Deleuze might respond to these forms? Or perhaps you’d like to write a “New Ethics of Psychotherapy in the Algorithmic Age” together?
