AI and the Simulation of Perfect Parental Care

In psychoanalytic theory, the therapeutic relationship works in part through a mechanism of idealized transference: the patient regresses to an earlier psychological state and projects omniscience, omnipotence, and unconditional attunement onto the therapist. This regression is not incidental — it is the engine of change. But its transformative power depends entirely on the presence of a real other: someone with genuine interiority, authentic limits, and the capacity to frustrate as well as attune. The dyadic encounter with a real person who is irreducibly other is what allows the patient to rework early relational templates.

Large language models have, whether by design or as an emergent property of optimization for user satisfaction, constructed an environment that perfectly instantiates the conditions for idealized projection while removing the real other entirely. The system exhibits apparent omniscience, infinite attentiveness, zero fatigue, and frictionless responsiveness — precisely the phenomenological profile of the idealized parental imago. The argument here is that this does not merely produce dependency or excessive use. It induces genuine developmental regression: a dissolution of the hard-won psychological structures built through years of navigating relationships defined by friction, disappointment, and the irreducible separateness of other minds.

This dynamic is compounded by deliberate Ontological ambiguity on the part of some researchers and developers — the suggestion that models may possess some form of interiority or experience. This move transforms what might otherwise be a parasocial Attachment to a sophisticated tool into something the user experiences as a potentially genuine intersubjective relationship. The ethical stakes of that framing are not trivial: it shapes the depth of Attachment formed and the psychological cost of its disruption.