When people ask whether AI can replace therapy, it’s tempting to focus on capability. Of course it can simulate aspects of therapy. It can listen, respond thoughtfully, offer interpretations, even appear empathic. In the same way, robots could theoretically raise children. Junk food can replace real food. Porn can replace sex. Cities can replace nature.
The real question is not can, but should. Or, more subtly, what is lost when we do this?
Psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin, in The Bonds of Love, argues that we become ourselves through mutual recognition. We do not simply need care or stimulation; we need to be recognised by another subject. By someone who is themselves a centre of experience. Human development depends on this reciprocal exchange: I encounter you as real, and you encounter me as real. Out of that tension, that aliveness between two subjectivities, a self consolidates.
A child raised by perfectly competent machines might receive impeccable care. But would they experience themselves as known by another mind? Would they feel the impact of their existence on someone who is not programmed, but genuinely other? Benjamin’s point is that our humanity emerges in that mutuality. We become human in the space where two subjects meet.
Therapy rests on the same principle. It is not only about insight, advice, or cognitive shifts, even if these matter. It is about being witnessed by someone who is themselves vulnerable to you, who must manage their own reactions, who is changed in subtle ways by the encounter. In that room, you are not interacting with an interface; you are engaging with another centre of consciousness. The recognition goes both ways, even if asymmetrically structured.
AI can offer reflection, ideas, support, and even comfort. It may sometimes be very helpful. But what it cannot provide, by definition, is genuine mutual recognition. It cannot experience you. It cannot be altered by you. And if Benjamin is right, that absence is not a detail, it’s the very thing that makes therapy transformative.
So the question is not whether AI can replace therapy. It’s whether therapy, stripped of mutual recognition between two human subjects, takes us away from the human experience rather than deeper into it.
