Choosing Screens, Rethinking Use

Choosing how we use screens — and favouring other activities — benefits both physical and psychological health. When screen use becomes excessive or unaccompanied, it can affect overall well-being: weight gain, sleep disturbances, agitation, inhibition, mental fatigue, and a weakened connection to oneself and others. The goal isn't to ban screens, but to consider their place in daily life, their function, their rhythm, and the alternatives we can offer. A teenager calling a friend and talking, or searching for homework information online, engages valuable cognitive and relational functions. That's not the same as spending hours alone on video games or endlessly scrolling through random content. Connection isn't built through texts — it's built through exchanged words, shared silences, and eye contact. Official guidelines and attention neuroscience Official guidelines in France recommend screen time be adapted to age: no screens before age 3, very limited use before age 6, and active guidance through adolescence. It's not about prohibition, but about choosing, guiding, commenting, and sharing. The YouTube video "The Habit That FORCES Your Brain To STOP Consuming" highlights this phenomenon: the brain, overstimulated by passive content, loses its ability to produce, connect, and dream. The author proposes a simple habit — reflective output — where one reformulates what was learned in their own words, slows the flow, and transforms consumption into creation. Neuroscience research, notably by Oppezzo and Schwartz at Stanford (2014), shows that walking boosts creativity by activating the brain's default mode network, which supports introspective thought and daydreaming. This network is inhibited by intense external stimulation. Concrete alternatives and psychological development A walk after school, baking a cake together, free play without screens, listening to music or radio, printed or drawn manual activities. Playing board games like CodeNames, card games, or hide-and-seek for younger children. For adults: conversing with someone, cooking dinner, gazing at the sky, playing an instrument, listening to the radio, or going for a walk. These simple gestures restore rhythm, connection, embodiment, and meaning. Studies on meditation in children and adolescents show positive effects on attention, executive functions, stress reduction, and academic performance. Expert voices Neuropsychiatrist Boris Cyrulnik emphasizes the importance of protecting young children from early screen exposure. He recommends no screens at all before age 3 — a critical period for brain development. Psychiatrist Serge Tisseron developed the 3-6-9-12 guidelines for digital education. He stresses the importance of guidance, content selection, and screen time regulation. It's not just about how long we spend on screens, but what we do, with whom, and how. Boredom as creative space Boredom, often feared, is actually a gateway to creativity. It allows individuals to confront themselves, mobilize internal resources, dream, and invent. The instant pleasure offered by screens — especially short videos — activates the brain's dopamine circuit without engaging symbolic pathways. It gives pleasure but doesn't build thought. What I sometimes suggest to families is not to ban screens, but to reintroduce spaces of emptiness, slowness, and movement — invitations to reconnect with oneself and the world, to rehabilitate boredom as a space for creation, and to restore the body's role in the development of thought. ReferencesCyrulnik, B. (2023). Pas d'écrans avant 3 ans. Ouest-France. Oppezzo, M., & Schwartz, D. L. (2014). Give your ideas some legs: The positive effect of walking on creative thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(4), 1142–1152. Tisseron, S. (2013). 3-6-9-12: Taming Screens and Growing Up. Érès.

Culture, Ritual and Healing

Through a transcultural and psychoanalytic lens, this article explores how collective rituals can serve as therapeutic frameworks for processing trauma. Drawing on diverse cultural examples — from Congo Square in New Orleans to Siberian shamanic ceremonies — it argues that psychological healing is not confined to clinical settings. It can emerge in shared cultural spaces where body, speech, and community are activated together. Introduction In his documentary When the Levees Broke (2006), Spike Lee captures not only the devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina, but also the invisible wound left by institutional abandonment. Through testimonies, music, and gatherings, he shows how culture becomes a space for memory, resistance, and healing. This cinematic gesture reveals a fundamental truth: healing is not limited to the individual. It is cultural, communal, and at times sacred. Congo Square: A Model of Community-Based Healing Congo Square in New Orleans is a historic site where freed slaves gathered every Sunday from the 18th century onward to dance, sing, and practice African rituals. These weekly gatherings preserved cultural memory while transforming suffering into symbolic expression. Congo Square can be viewed as a genuine community-based therapeutic space, where movement, rhythm, and collective presence allow emotions to be expressed and processed. It functions as a shared psychic stage, much like the ancient Greek theater, where emotions are experienced, externalized, and transformed. Other Rituals of Healing Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer: Pilgrimage and Identity Each year, travelling communities — Roma, Gitans, Manouches — gather in Camargue to honour Saint Sara the Black. The procession to the sea, accompanied by music and dance, is a ritual of familial transmission and communal recognition. Though often marginalised in public discourse, this pilgrimage offers a powerful symbolic framework for reworking internal conflicts through collective ritual. Durga Puja in India: Feminine Power and Social Cohesion In India, the Durga Puja festival celebrates the goddess Durga, a figure of strength and protection. Processions, dances, and communal rituals reaffirm social bonds, especially in regions affected by violence or disaster. The ritual becomes a space of transformation, where trauma is narrated, shared, and symbolized through protective archetypes. Siberian Shamanic Ceremonies: Healing Through Symbolic Journey Among Indigenous peoples of Siberia, shamanic rituals are used to restore psychic and social balance. The shaman enters trance to communicate with spirits and reestablish harmony after traumatic events. These ceremonies allow chaos to be symbolized and reintegrate the subject into a cosmic and communal order. Native American Talking Circles and Sweat Lodges Indigenous communities in North America practise talking circles and sweat lodges as rituals of purification and healing. These practices offer a structured space for narrating trauma, where body, speech, and group are engaged together. Greek Theater: A Foundational Model of Catharsis Aristotle defines tragedy as the imitation of actions that evoke pity and fear, leading to catharsis — a purification of emotions. Ancient Greek theater provided a collective space where spectators could experience intense emotions through tragic heroes, within an aesthetic and ritualized framework. This therapeutic function of classical drama anticipates modern communal healing practices. Culture as Therapeutic Mediation As Marie-Rose Moro emphasises, culture is a therapeutic resource. It allows the subject to be understood within their context, history, and affiliations. It offers symbolic mediations where verbal language may fall short. In transcultural clinical practice, the therapist becomes a mediator of connection, a guardian of structure, and a witness to narrative. Culture, Healing, and the Commons Informal and community-based healing rituals represent a form of resistance to the privatisation of connection and the fragmentation of meaning. They affirm that psychological healing cannot be separated from the cultural and social fabric in which it is embedded. In the face of trauma, collective ritual acts as a stage for catharsis. Whether at Congo Square, Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, Durga Puja, or in sweat lodges, these practices show that healing is also a matter of culture, memory, and connection — and as such, it must not be reduced to a commodity or economic transaction.

Growing Old Together: When Bodies Fall Out of Sync and the Bond Must Be Rewritten

Growing Old Together: When Bodies Fall Out of Sync and the Bond Must Be Rewritten

Growing old together is not a simple continuation of what came before. In some couples who have shared a lifetime side by side, something begins to shift almost imperceptibly. The years have settled like thin layers of sediment, the children have grown, grandchildren bring their joyful turbulence, and retirement has become a familiar landscape. One might imagine that everything is stable, that the bond has crystallized into a quiet certainty. Yet around seventy for her, a little later for him, a subtle disturbance sometimes appears, like a change in the internal weather. She notices a new irritability, a tension that does not belong to their shared history. He perceives in her a heightened sensitivity, a different way of inhabiting the everyday. Nothing dramatic. Rather a delicate displacement, a silent rearrangement of psychic positions. As if, after so many seasons lived together, the couple still had to learn how to readjust. Menopause, for her, is long behind, yet its symbolic effects continue to unfold. Simone de Beauvoir showed how women often enter old age earlier, not only through the body but through the social gaze, which anticipates and imposes transformation before biology does. She has already encountered the question of aging, of loss, of reinvention. Andropause, for him, arrives later, more slowly, almost clandestinely. It sometimes manifests as diffuse irritability, reduced tolerance, a heightened sensitivity to frustration. As if the male body, long supported by a fiction of continuity, were suddenly reminded of its finitude. George Vaillant’s work on male aging highlights how this period can unsettle self-esteem, awaken old anxieties, or reactivate defenses that once served well. In this temporal gap, something is replayed. She has already crossed her hormonal storms, already renegotiated her symbolic place. He is only beginning to face his. And in this slight desynchronization, the couple must compose a new scene, one in which each must relinquish a part of who they believed themselves to be. Irvin Yalom wrote that long-term couples are “laboratories of existence,” where the great human questions—freedom, solitude, death, meaning—are continually revisited. At this age, these questions cease to be abstract. They become tangible. They slip into daily gestures, silences, irritations. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the real of the body returns. Lacan emphasized that the body is never merely an organism: it is a site of jouissance, loss, and lack—an unpredictable partner that resists mastery. At eighty, this real asserts itself. And this partner cannot be seduced, convinced, or controlled. One must negotiate with it. Freud, in On Transience, reminded us that the fragility of what we love—its perishability—can intensify attachment as much as it threatens it. Growing old together means feeling time become palpable, giving the bond a new gravity. The irritability of the aging partner is not only biological. It can be a defense against the terror of vulnerability, a way to keep at bay the fear of falling, of dependence, of disappearance. Erik Erikson described the final stage of life as a fragile balance between integrity and despair—an inner work where irritability may mask deeper unease. She, for her part, oscillates between patience and fatigue. She may have gained inner freedom as physical strength diminished. She can welcome, but she can also tire. What unfolds here is not only hormonal or physiological: it is a redistribution of roles, a rewriting of the conjugal pact. Some couples find in this period a new tenderness, a complicity freed from performance. Others see old wounds resurface, long-muted frustrations reappear. Time, as it advances, reveals the fault lines. Laura Carstensen’s socioemotional selectivity theory shows that older adults tend to prioritize essential bonds and authentic emotions, which can intensify both gentleness and tension. And yet, there is in these aging couples a singular strength: that of those who have weathered storms together—births, losses, departures, returns. A strength that is not spoken, but visible in the way they sometimes still look at each other, as if despite everything, despite irritations, despite bodies that resist, something holds. Winnicott spoke of the capacity to be alone in the presence of another. Perhaps this is what mature love becomes: a peaceful coexistence, where each can be themselves without the other becoming a threat. A way of inhabiting time together, without seeking to correct, convince, or transform. At seventy, at eighty, the couple is no longer a project. It is a work. A living, fragile, sometimes rough work, but profoundly human. And within this humanity, there is still movement, desire, conflict, care. There is still life. ​ References  Baltes, P. B., & Baltes, M. M. (1990). Successful aging. Cambridge University Press. Beauvoir, S. de. (1970). Old age. Gallimard. Carstensen, L. L. (2011). A long bright future. PublicAffairs. Cohen, G. D. (2005). The mature mind: The positive power of the aging brain. Basic Books. Erikson, E. H. (1997). The life cycle completed. W. W. Norton. Freud, S. (1915). On transience. In Standard Edition (Vol. 14). Lacan, J. (1975). The seminar, Book XX: Encore. Seuil. Vaillant, G. (2002). Aging well. Little, Brown and Company. Winnicott, D. W. (1958). The capacity to be alone. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 39, 416–420. Yalom, I. D. (2008). Staring at the sun: Overcoming the terror of death. Jossey-Bass.

Artificial Intelligence and Psychic Care

"Artificial intelligence does not barge into the realm of psychic care. It enters quietly, through daily use, mobile interfaces, and conversational tools." Conventional care emphasises a slow, embodied relational space made of waiting, transference, and silent containment. AI systems, by contrast, offer constant availability and algorithmic responsiveness. AI's genuine advantages are real: extending support during unavailable clinical hours, enabling personalised follow-up through data analysis, identifying early warning signs, and expanding access across geographical boundaries. Yet significant concerns remain. Psychological information ranks among the most confidential data, yet "information travels through servers, clouds, and probabilistic models." Training datasets often contain historical biases that may distort understanding of marginalised populations. Clara finds relief in conversational AI, yet describes it as "dialogue without flesh." Effective care requires "a subjective encounter, a crossing through words and silences" involving a vulnerable, genuine other person. Care remains a space of otherness and shared temporality. AI functions best as a supplementary tool rather than a replacement for human therapeutic presence and authentic connection.

Burnout: A Clinical Reading

Burnout is often reduced to a synonym for work stress. But examined through a psychoanalytic lens, it reveals itself as something far more personal: not a uniform condition, but a constellation of signs shaped by the individual's history. Three Clinical Vignettes Julien, a middle-aged executive, describes emotional numbness despite outward productivity: "I tick all the boxes, but I no longer feel anything." The machine runs — but there is no one at the wheel. Claire, a nurse, describes a sudden bodily refusal to continue. Where words had failed, the body spoke. This moment can be read as a conflict between an idealized self-image — the one who never breaks, who always gives — and the reality of human limits. Marc, a teacher, reveals how family patterns of self-sacrifice unconsciously drive his overextension. His exhaustion is not incidental; it repeats a script written long before his career began. A Collapse of Primary Narcissism Burnout, understood clinically, represents a collapse of primary narcissism — the foundational self-structure that sustains a sense of worth. Unconscious repetition often underlies these experiences: patients replay childhood patterns of abandonment or self-erasure in their professional lives. Listening Rather Than Eliminating A psychoanalytic approach rejects standardized protocols. Rather than treating burnout as a pathology to be eliminated, the work consists in listening to it as meaningful communication — a signal from the subject that something essential has been overridden. The therapeutic aim is to help individuals reclaim psychological boundaries and reconnect with their own desires.

Debt in the Analytic Process

Within the therapeutic framework, the issue of payment for sessions can elicit questions, ambivalence, or resistance from some patients. While seemingly a practical matter, it engages far deeper psychic, symbolic, and relational stakes. The fee is not merely an amount — it embodies a moment of subjective commitment where desire, debt, and the structure of the analytic framework converge. Debt as the Foundation of Desire Jacques Lacan, particularly in his Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, emphasises the ethical dimension of desire and its grounding in lack. For him, debt does not correspond to a material due but arises from the fact that the subject finds themselves spoken before they have spoken. This inherited call from the Other represents a structuring void, framing desire as symbolic debt. Clinical example: A patient mentions family pressure around career choices: "My parents expect me to succeed." She experiences herself in constant debt to unspoken expectations. Here, desire emerges in the gap between what the Other projects and what the subject seeks to construct. Even before a child utters their first word, they are already shaped by parental projections — "He'll be a doctor," "She looks like her grandmother." This received discourse precedes the subject's own, and becomes the soil for symbolic debt. Clinical example: A patient early in her treatment explains that her parents gave her everything and never expected anything in return. She feels guilty about paying for therapy. This payment evokes archaic tensions between giving and being allowed to receive. The Fee as a Site of Elaboration The therapist's fee does not reflect a capitalist price but functions as a symbolic act. It delineates a space, supports a subjective temporality, and anchors investment in transference. Clinical example: A patient regularly forgets to pay or postpones the act. This behaviour may reflect a resistance to full engagement in treatment and an ambivalence toward the analyst and the frame. Alternate example: A patient asks to reduce the fee during a personal crisis. Beneath the request lies a tendency to transform the analytic link into a gratuitous affective bond. Upholding the frame prevents regression into dependency and preserves the therapeutic function. As Didier Anzieu describes, the frame upholds the analytic structure and safeguards psychic work from collapse into fusion or narcissistic exchange. Clinical Function of Payment The fee acts as a containing function within the analytic setting. It reignites confrontation with the Law — not as punishment but as the origin of desire. It allows the patient to navigate ambivalence about treatment, swinging between the wish to heal and internal resistance. By setting a fee, the analyst does not engage in commerce, but offers a scene where debt can be articulated, displaced, and worked through. Payment becomes a metaphor of the primordial gift, of returning to the Other, and of the possibility of a truly engaged speech. Conclusion Far from a mere financial transaction, payment within analytic work opens a space for desire, lack, and relational elaboration. It becomes an essential modality of the therapeutic frame — an interface between symbolic debt and subjective emergence. In doing so, it supports the patient's speech, anchors temporal movement, and marks a trajectory toward the appropriation of one's own desire.

Separation and Coparental Reconstruction

In my clinical practice, I encounter many parents in transition, facing the profound adjustments brought on by separation. One recurring theme is the presence of children caught in parental conflict — sometimes latent, sometimes overt — where each adult seeks to express their narrative, their legitimacy, their pain. The child then becomes, knowingly or unknowingly, the vehicle of an unresolved conflict. A Rupture with Multiple Effects The separation of a parental couple entails deep transformations. It cannot be reduced to a legal event or an emotional decision; it brings about a psychic reconfiguration of emotional investments and representations. Each parent must disengage from the conjugal bond while maintaining a viable coparental relationship. This process often reactivates intense affects: anger, sadness, a sense of failure, narcissistic wounds — and also more archaic anxieties, tied to the fear of abandonment or the loss of a loved object. Clinical example: A recently separated mother experiences the reorganisation of custody schedules as exclusion. She says, "The father decides everything on his own," and adds, "As if I no longer exist in my son's story." This feeling reveals a narcissistic wound but also an anxiety of erasure — of being erased from the symbolic narrative of the child. From Couplehood to Coparenting The end of romantic attachment does not signify the end of the parental bond, but demands a displacement of psychic investment and transference. Without sufficient processing, this shift may evolve into persistent rivalry, with coparenting becoming the battleground of an unresolved separation. Clinical example: A father confides in session that he struggles to accept not bathing his daughter at the mother's house. "It's our moment. She's depriving me of it like she wants to cut our bond." The ritual becomes the safeguard of affection, and its absence threatens his existence as a loved figure. The Child at the Heart of Reconstruction Children continue to need both parents after a separation. But to keep developing, they require a coherent symbolic space where identifications can be maintained without splitting. When one parent invalidates or erases the other, the child faces a loyalty conflict. They may experience diffuse anxiety, unspoken guilt, or a protective attitude toward the more vulnerable parent. Psychological effects may manifest in symptoms — sleep disorders, aggression, somatic complaints — that signal an internal split between the child's identifications. Clinical example: A seven-year-old boy begins referring to himself in the third person after his father leaves. He says, "He's sad because Daddy yelled." This linguistic shift reveals a defensive process — a dissociation of emotion indicating difficulty integrating affect into subjective speech. The Role of the Clinician as Containing Third The clinician plays the role of containing third. They offer a space where losses can be processed, where affect can circulate, and where the parental bond can be reconstructed — not aimed at reconciling the adults but at restoring exchanges in which each parent is acknowledged in their role. Clinical Conclusion Psychoanalysis does not offer technical solutions but enables us to interpret relational ghosts, reactivated oedipal scenarios, fears of abandonment, and narcissistic struggles playing out in the present. It opens the way for a living form of coparenting — one that can rebuild outside the field of conflict. For the child not to become a mere witness of parental conflict, but to remain central to care and connection, it is essential to preserve a shared psychic space — where each parent can continue to exist, not in the pain of separation, but in the responsibility of building a future.

Fostered Kinship and Parenthood

Becoming a parent for someone who was adopted represents more than a life stage — it constitutes a genuine psychic journey, where the very foundations of the bond, origin, and transmission are replayed. The adoption experience continuously resurfaces throughout adulthood, particularly during transformative life events. Parenthood activates psychological traces linked to abandonment, fantasies about origins, and questions about one's capacity to transmit love and identity to the next generation. Psychoanalytic theory presents filiation across multiple dimensions: biological, symbolic, psychic, and narrative. Adoption uniquely challenges each of these axes simultaneously. Biological and Symbolic Dimensions Biological considerations often trigger anxiety. One expectant mother expressed: "I don't even know where I come from, so how will my baby know where they come from?" This reveals how origin uncertainty creates transmission anxieties. The symbolic framework — legal and social — provides formal legitimacy but may not ensure psychological integration. A patient reflected: "Yes, I was adopted. I had a loving family… but I always felt something was missing." Psychic and Narrative Axes The psychic axis determines genuine appropriation of the parental bond. An adopted mother disclosed: "I'm afraid I'll be like the one who left me. It feels like there's a flaw in me." The narrative axis enables subjects to construct coherent identity through storytelling, rewriting personal history via transmission. Prospective parenthood reactivates these dimensions, sometimes conflictually. One man undergoing assisted reproduction stated: "I need a child to prove that I belong to a lineage too." Clinical Variations Bydlowski's concept of psychic transparency describes this vulnerable period where unconscious material emerges intensely. Parentification — becoming psychically parental — may experience delays or obstacles. Some adopted adults approach parenthood creatively. An adoptive mother explained: "I created my own rituals with my daughter. They don't resemble anything I received, but they're ours." Others experience ambivalence or inhibition. Clinically, the therapist's function involves supporting symbolisation and narrative development, validating parenthood without requiring legitimacy justification. Conclusion Adoptive parenthood demonstrates that parental bonds are not decreed — they are built, negotiated, imagined and narrated. Adopted individuals may become architects of meaningful connection, crafting singular and deeply human kinship.

Suffering Bodies, Absent Speech

Eating disorders — anorexia, bulimia, binge eating — raise questions far beyond nutrition or food-related behaviour. They reveal a troubled relationship with the body, self-image, desire, and often, the Other. The question is not simply what the individual eats or refuses to eat, but what this behaviour means to them, what it communicates in their place — sometimes from a buried history that has never been spoken. When speech is obstructed or too painful to express, the body speaks: it mimics, reenacts, substitutes. The eating symptom becomes a gesture of figuration, a way for the subject to become readable where they cannot be heard. Freud described the symptom as a compromise between drive and repression; Lacan reminds us that "the symptom is the trace of a bodily event captured in the order of language." Three Clinical Cases Anastasia (17) comes to therapy at her mother's request, due to her extreme thinness. Intellectually gifted, she rejects all medical concern. A phrase recurs in her speech: "I want to disappear without making noise." She avoids signs of femininity, distrusts bodily transformation, and appears to seek through dietary control a total mastery over her body — and ultimately, over her place in the world. Her emaciated body becomes a symbol of resistance against intrusion, sexualisation, and the gaze of the Other. Anton (24) begins therapy after a breakup that triggers renewed bulimic episodes. He describes alternating between uncontrollable urges and violent rejection as punishment: "I fill myself to hate myself afterward." His family history reveals paternal abandonment and an emotionally preoccupied mother. The unspoken affective void from childhood appears lodged in his body. By reworking the unmet needs of childhood through transference, Anton begins to articulate his experience in terms other than compulsion. Rachel (38) suffers from nighttime binge-eating. In early sessions, she describes her body as "an armor," a means to become invisible, a protection from a world perceived as threatening. Her history is marked by unprocessed traumatic events. The body functions as a projection screen; the eating symptom acts as a numbing agent in response to unspeakable suffering. Through verbalising this buried experience, Rachel begins to reclaim her body — not as a barrier, but as a space of existence. Conclusion Eating disorders cannot be reduced to nutritional concerns or isolated behavioural phenomena. They may be understood as psychic expressions where speech fails — incomplete attempts to give shape to subjective suffering. Each patient engages with the symptom in a unique way, grounded in their personal history. Psychoanalysis does not aim to erase the symptom but to elaborate it. It offers a space of listening where the symptom can be narrated, linked to intimate experience, and gradually re-integrated into a process of subjectivation. The body thereby shifts from being a passive object to a symbolic medium. The subject can then reclaim their story — not through repetition or mastery, but through speech, meaning, and encounter.

Artificial Intelligence in Mental Health

Artificial intelligence has firmly established itself as an essential tool in various fields, including mental health care. While its integration raises ethical and philosophical debates, it also introduces unprecedented opportunities to support patients, particularly in situations where access to care is limited or human relationships are strained. AI as a Tool for Mental Health Support The demand for psychological care far exceeds the capacities of current health systems. Tools such as chatbots (e.g., Wysa or Woebot) offer immediate support to patients dealing with anxiety or depression, complementing traditional consultations. For individuals who are isolated or reluctant to consult a professional, AI can serve as an initial point of contact. Applications like Kanopee help users manage stress and sleep disorders through interactive exercises and motivational dialogues. These tools reduce barriers to access while guiding patients toward professional care when needed. AI as a Facilitating Third Party In parental conflict situations where direct dialogue has become impossible, AI can act as a mediator. By structuring exchanges and eliminating emotional biases, AI can help restore constructive dialogue. From a psychoanalytic perspective, AI can also act as a symbolic third party between therapy sessions — a chatbot designed to encourage introspection might help a patient maintain a connection with their therapeutic process. While this role does not replace the therapist, it enhances the patient's experience by providing continuity. Ethical and Philosophical Reflections Cynthia Fleury emphasises the importance of preserving the human dimension in technological interactions: "AI must be envisioned as a tool that supports human vulnerability, rather than substituting therapeutic relationships." The use of AI in psychological care raises significant ethical challenges:How can the confidentiality of sensitive patient data be ensured? How can algorithms avoid perpetuating discriminatory biases? How can AI remain a neutral and non-intrusive tool?These challenges necessitate strict regulations and close collaboration between developers, clinicians, and ethicists. Practical Applications A study published in BMC Psychology demonstrated that chatbots can significantly reduce anxiety levels in crisis contexts, such as conflict zones. Although their efficacy is lower than that of traditional therapies, they provide an accessible and scalable solution for vulnerable populations. Conclusion: Toward a Humanistic Integration of AI Artificial intelligence, when used ethically and thoughtfully, can enrich the field of psychological care. However, its integration must be guided by clear principles: safeguarding the dignity and freedom of individuals, ensuring data confidentiality, and promoting a human-centred approach. By intersecting philosophical, psychoanalytic, and technological perspectives, AI has the potential to become a powerful tool for addressing current mental health challenges while upholding fundamental values of care and humanity.