Authors
Moritz Scheck, Tilman C Müller, Lalenia Zizek
Published in
Praxis der Kinderpsychologie und Kinderpsychiatrie. Volume 75. Issue 6. Pages 466-485.
Abstract
Psychodynamics in the Age of AI - Reflections on the Significance of Digital Socialisation in Therapeutic and Educational Settings with Young People Since having mostly been made freely available, large language models (LLMs) have become an integral part of adolescents' daily lives. As young people increasingly interact with LLMs about personal matters and problems, LLMs can be understood as socialisation agents during the development of adolescents. This article explores the impact of emotionally compensatory AI use on adolescents' experience and development, as well as on psychodynamic work with them. Analyzing interviews we conducted with emotionally vulnerable adolescents, we show that LLMs are used as companions to help with emotional regulation in acute emotional crises as well as to compensate for loneliness. We find that LLMs function as vehicles for regressive tendencies, which may provide a short-term stabilizing effect, however, fostering emotional dependency. As users can use LLMs to avoid intersubjective conflict, as well as deficiency and ambiguity, this potentially impedes their willingness to engage in psychodynamic understanding of the other and consequently their ability to deal with conflicts. This could, in turn, exacerbate psychopathological symptoms. Finally, we suggest that psychotherapeutic professionals as well as social workers use psychodynamic skills to properly comprehend the unconscious desires and conflicts which adolescents enact with LLMs to foster their progressive development.
PMID:
42834649
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 06 Oct 2026.
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