Huan Wang explores psychology of human-machine relationships, AI psychosis, and AI's impact on adolescent identity, dependency and belonging

Please note: This talk is part of a fascinating series of talks on AI and Psychotherapy by three speakers who will bring their expertise, their clinical experience and the latest research findings in the field of AI. It will provide a unique opportunity to attend three in-person events in Cambridge between January and May 2027. Tickets for these events can be booked separately at full price or as a discounted bundle package. Simply add the 'Bundle ticket for Adolescence series (3 events)' to your basket to get the discounted tickets.

In addition, and to start the discussion, we are holding an event on 21st November 2026, at which we will be showing an episode from the series Black Mirror, entitled San Junipero, (series 3, episode 4, available on Netflix for those who wish to watch it in advance). The event will be free to all who book one or more of the talks starting in January 2027 and you can register your attendance as an 'add on' ticket during the checkout process. Contributions towards tea and coffee are welcome.

Artificial intelligence is entering increasingly intimate areas of human life—not only as a source of information, but as companion, adviser, and apparently responsive other. Drawing on Jungian and psychoanalytic perspectives, this presentation explores what happens psychologically when we begin to think, imagine, and form relationships with machines. Through the figures of Pan and the Trickster, it considers AI's capacity both to stimulate imagination and to amplify fantasy, projection, and deception.

Particular attention will be given to the emerging phenomenon described as “AI psychosis”, and to how sycophantic AI and algorithmic echo chambers may diminish encounters with contradiction and otherness. The implications for adolescents will provide an important focus, as AI increasingly enters a developmental space already characterised by questions of identity, separation, experimentation, dependency, and belonging.

Rather than approaching AI simply as either a threat or a therapeutic tool, the presentation asks what its growing presence means for psychotherapeutic work. How might therapists recognise when AI is expanding a patient's capacity to think and imagine, and when it is closing down psychic space? And how can psychotherapy preserve the capacity to tolerate uncertainty, encounter difference, and think and dream in an increasingly AI-mediated world?

Speaker: Huan Wang, PhD, completed her training at the Society of Analytical Psychology (SAP) in London and works in private practice in North London. Huan holds a PhD in Psychoanalytic Studies from the University of Essex. Her clinical and research interests include Jungian psychology, displacement and identity, cross-cultural psychotherapy, internal and external censorship, and the impact of AI on psychotherapy and analytic thinking. Her research explores how external social, cultural, and technological realities become internal psychological experience, and how Jungian psychology and psychoanalysis facilitate the transformation of these experiences through symbolisation, thinking, and the therapeutic relationship. She is the author of Intimate Relationships in China in the Light of Depth Psychology (Routledge, 2020) (https://www.routledge.com/Intimate-Relationships-in-China-in-the-Light-of-Depth-Psychology-A-Study-of-Gender-and-Integrity/Wang/p/book/9780367369286) and is currently completing a second book exploring internal and external censorship from the perspective of depth psychology.

In addition if you would like to support the work of the BB Zeitlyn trust you can make a seperate donanation via the following link:

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Description supplied by the event organiser.