In recent therapeutic practice, a subtle but revealing shift has begun to surface. Clients increasingly reference their conversations with artificial intelligence in the same way they once referenced friends, partners, or family members. They say it casually, often without irony: “That’s exactly what ChatGPT told me.” The tone is not confrontational. It is reassuring. An agreement is experienced as safety.
This phenomenon is often misunderstood as a question of professional rivalry or technological replacement. It is neither. What is taking place is a deeper reorganization of where people locate mental support, authority, and coherence.
Peter Putnam’s work on the theory of mind offers a useful lens. He argued that human understanding does not arise from isolated cognition, but from sustained engagement with other minds. Meaning is not generated privately and then exchanged. It is co-constructed in the space between people, under conditions of uncertainty, misattunement, and repair. Mind develops through friction, not smoothness.
Artificial intelligence introduces something qualitatively different. For the first time, individuals have access to a responsive interlocutor that offers coherence without exposure. It is always available. It does not judge. It does not tire. It does not have needs of its own. It does not require the user to account for another person’s feelings, history, or vulnerability. The interaction carries no social cost.
Historically, people relied on others not because those others were perfectly attuned, but because they were present. Friends disagreed. Family members misunderstood. Conversations involved negotiation, risk, and emotional consequence. Some people had to tolerate discomfort to remain in relationships.
AI removes that requirement. It offers something closer to what Putnam might describe as a closed coherence loop. The system reflects the user’s thoughts back in a refined, stable, emotionally neutral form. This creates a powerful sense of being understood, even when no mutual understanding has occurred. The experience is validating without being relational.
When clients bring AI into the therapeutic space, they are not asking whether a therapist is correct. They are revealing where they now locate safety. An agreement between therapist and AI feels comforting because it stabilizes meaning. It confirms that a right formulation exists independently of relationships.
But therapy does not operate in that register.
Therapeutic work belongs to a different epistemology. It is not primarily about correctness, but about contact. Not only about validation, but about sustaining attention when validation is unavailable. Growth often occurs not when something makes immediate sense, but when meaning temporarily destabilizes and must be held rather than resolved. AI excels at resolution.
Human minds develop through endurance.
The risk is not that people use AI to think. Reflection has always been supported by external tools. Journals, letters, books, conversations. The difference is that these tools either introduce a delay or require another human subject. AI introduces immediacy without reciprocity. This subtly reshapes the psyche.
When a person repeatedly turns to a system that never pushes back, never misunderstands, never withdraws, and never asks anything in return, their tolerance for relational complexity can quietly diminish. Ambiguity becomes harder to hold. Disagreement feels unnecessary. Emotional labor begins to seem optional rather than constitutive of human life.
From this perspective, a therapist is not being replaced. A therapist is being repositioned. No longer a primary site of meaning-making, but a space where meaning must coexist with another mind. This coexistence is precisely what AI cannot offer.
Putnam emphasized that minds are not transparent to themselves. We come to know ourselves through the resistance and responsiveness of others. A system that offers perfect coherence risks short-circuiting that process.
What we are witnessing, then, is not technological overreach, but a shift in cultural preference. A movement away from relationships that demand tolerance for uncertainty, toward interfaces that promise clarity without consequence.
The therapeutic task remains unchanged, but its context has altered. To hold space not for agreement, but for the kind of thinking that can only occur when another living mind is present. A mind that can misunderstand. A mind that can disappoint. A mind that stays.
In a world increasingly optimized for comfort, therapy may become one of the last places where coherence is not immediately supplied but slowly earned. And that, perhaps, is its enduring value.
© Inna Goldina