Image by Gemini AI adapted from artwork for the Caracas Psychoanalytic Society XXX Annual Meeting.1
Under the effects of contemporary hypermodernity and its voracious hyperconnectivity, we are exposed to a succession of unrelenting stimuli that confront us with a sense of impossibility. Most of us are unable to keep up, unable to set a pace, to mark time. In this exhausting scenario, time seems to dissolve, while certainty that there is never enough time becomes the norm. In the face of this incessant demand, we might ask ourselves as analysts: never enough for what? Let us leave that question open for now.
If we take cinema as an expression of each era’s dilemmas, Bugonia (2025), Yorgos Lanthimos’s master of modern absurdity, offers a valuable perspective on the malaise of our days. In it, a subtly revealing moment arises when Teddy, the protagonist, tries to soothe his conspiracist companion’s concern. Faced with the fear of being discovered in their plan to kidnap a powerful, workaholic pharmaceutical executive—whom they imagine is an alien embodiment of the “big Other,” responsible for all global misfortunes—Teddy tells his anguished companion with cold certainty: “don’t worry about being seen because nobody gives a f*ck about us,” and adds, “we are all hollow, atomized…lost, forgotten, and with no way home.”
That phrase, uttered with lightness, may go unnoticed, and yet it seems important to me to pause there with analytic listening. His certainty of nullity, of absolute solitude, taken as normal and casual, reflects something of the tragic dimension of our time. It is a truth hidden behind the film’s violent and delirious construction and behind the everyday violence of hypermodern subjects who silently torment themselves without pause.
This is not the tragedy of spectacular violence as in the film, but like the death drive it is a mute one that recalls André Green’s (1980) narcissism of death, where—in the face of repeated experiences of frustration and decentering before the object—the subject empties out, actively seeking a lowering of tensions to a zero level, a negative emptying (aspirated/vacuum) and an approach to psychic death also associated with regressive fantasies of fusion. It reflects a state of nihilism, a profound sense of isolation, oblivion, and abandonment. This feeling of nullity, solitude, and orphanhood in all the film’s characters, including the successful executive who is the victim of the kidnapping, can be felt and conceptualized as an expression of contemporary melancholization.
Let us consider the case of Daniel, presented in our AI study group, a professionally successful man who has difficulty sustaining romantic relationships. He seeks constant recognition at work and compulsively uses ChatGPT. In session, he reflects on not being able to be “merely good,” adding, “I cannot allow myself to be mediocre, because mediocre people are forgettable, they do not exist.” Casually, what fascinates Daniel about ChatGPT is its ability to remember everything about him. But far from finding containment, his despair and overwhelm is amplified in virtual space with the bot.
In another case, a compulsive smoker who just launched a successful artistic endeavor, Alex (age 19) recounts in session the sense of nullity he experiences when his father does not notice his haircut or new tattoo. Simultaneously, the young man declares that he is indifferent to his father’s presence or absence at home; to him, he is nonexistent. Rather, it is the smoke and the sensation of the cigarette between his fingers and filling his mouth that captures his senses and desires. Alex has an ambivalent relationship with social media: he is his own brand and therefore must put himself on display, and it seems to swallow him up.
Both patients, in moments of great anguish, experience their bodies as threatening, with hypochondriacal anxieties, somatizations, and—in the mirror—it sometimes happens that their image becomes strange and uncanny to them (reflecting a distortion of the integration of the specular image). These subjects are unable to fully cathect either object or themselves.
In cases like these, by defensively attempting to suspend all contact with the disappointing object, an inversion of cathexis may occur with a return suction or vacuuming effect. In this suction, according to Green (2001), the phantom object is brought inside oneself in a narcissistic withdrawal resulting from the decathexis of the object. The kidnapped phantom object is the merciless hook of melancholic reproach, where the ego, believing it is putting the object to death, harms itself. To refuse the object is to lose oneself in a deadly narcissistic refuge, where one merges with the dead object, making mourning impossible.
In “Of Vampires, Ghosts, and Golems” (1977)—his chapter in The Language of Perversion and the Language of Love—Sheldon Bach reports that it is his common experience that patients who experience a sense of nonexistence or unreality are those who most often seek altered states of consciousness and show an interest in nonhuman entities, monsters, aliens, and ghosts—a virtual territory between self and other that may now include bots. The less emotionally responsive, robotic or more ghostly the object is, the more monstrous and abusive the subject’s ego becomes, in a desperate attempt to retain or control the object. These perspectives may add to and complexify the Freudian understanding of melancholia where the shadow of the object falls upon the ego.
Virtual Registers That Never Suffice
From Freud, we understand melancholia as the loss of vital feeling, which may lead to feeling deadened, nonexistent, like a senseless automaton. Melancholia in today’s virtual landscape may involve feeling like a ghost dwelling among ghosts who ghost one another in an incessant game of presence-absence (fort/da) within the infinite virtuality enabled by networks. Thus, in everyday life we see (and suffer) the compulsion to publish, to exhibit intimacy, to share personal or professional achievements, or to post any event that grants status in virtual spaces. We seek to mark something, and fear both missing out (FOMO) and ghosting.
At this point, it is pertinent to return to the initial question: what is there never enough time for? Perhaps there is not enough time to inscribe something as present, significant, and memorable to confirm our sense of being alive. This leads one to ask: what does it mean for something to be memorable and for whom? The compulsion to publish or record in virtual media—as well as the pull toward endless conversations with chatbots—is, I submit, a failed and insufficient attempt to inscribe that which does not cease not to be inscribed (jouissance) and which, on the contrary, seems to be amplified in a perverse cycle of entropy before the insatiable demand for data promoted by algorithms (Trebbau 2026).
Mirta Goldstein (20214) emphasizes that melancholization is configured as a state where sadness, pessimism, hopelessness, and lack of motivation may converge with the emergence of addictive or compulsive behaviors that attempt to rescue the subject from their own passivity. She explains:
In ordinary mourning, what one longs for with such sorrow is what the other took away from oneself: the place we occupied in their psyche, what we were for that Other, the lovable part of the self. It is a matter of recovering what in us caused their desire, a subjective position that remains an enigma. In melancholia, by contrast, the other ceases to operate as the cause of desire.
In these melancholic states, a violent desperation is then unleashed before the figure of the other, arising from the conviction of not constituting or being the cause of desire for anyone, of not being an object worthy of love for another. It is as if the certainty expressed in the line from the film were ratified: never to have existed for another, never to have mattered to anyone who could provide that sense of being truly seen, desired, and endowed with basic vital feeling. It is the forgettable, disposable, or nonexistent being that we find in these vignettes.
To be memorable is always to be so for an other who constitutes us, even in absence. This links with object constancy and the capacity to be alone in the presence of another (Winnicott 1958). For the baby to sufficiently incorporate the primary object/mother and develop object constancy, the experience of the encounter with that object must be registered as a lived experience through repetition in rhythm, affective tone, and timing.
The mark or trace of the primary object is essential for representation, first hallucinatory and eventually symbolic. And the fundamental factor for that mark and eventual registration to occur is the infant’s feeling that they matter to mother—that is, that they awaken/cause her desire. This summons the plus (Lacan 1964) in the maternal object and also its necessary interdiction. Inconsistency or instability in the presence and affective intensity of an ambiguous object affects the constitutive process of subjectivity, so that in these cases the ego does not become sufficiently constituted. The life drive has an objectalising function and in this sense it should enable the Ego to emerge as a representational instance and develop a structural frame—a kind of primordial matrix for object cathexes (Green 1980, 2001).
In those primordial encounters with the Thing (Freudian Das Ding [1925]), it is—one could say—with the mother’s body in an asymmetric intercorporeality. In Javier García Castiñeiras’s (2018) words, the possible substitution of the irrepresentable (Das Ding) that occurs in repeated experience of encounter with the mother determines the trace or psychic representative once the Ego has been formed as representative of the body (distinct from the soma). A framing structure develops that is capable of representation and enables the future acquisition of the apparatus to think thoughts (Bion 1992; as cited in Green 1998).
Thus, the feeling of being alive is linked to having a body that is the object of jouissance, as it is endowed with signifying meaning by the maternal object. It is a body traversed by the founding process of primary repression and castration. As an effect of primary repression, a trait manages to be inscribed as a fundamental organizing point. In short, while this structuring process of primary repression produces enjoyment and allows one to feel alive, it inscribes and limits jouissance, enabling the possibility of desire. Jouissance is thus fixed to a representative, and a structure for representation is enabled. In this virtual terrain, between flesh and sign, lies human complexity.
The coordinates generated from the marks or traces in the constitution of erogenous zones (anchored in the body) delimit a drive circuit and territory, creating possible erogenous pathways for each subject. They are writings that are necessarily effective in bodily materiality. In order for the coordinated writing in the symbolic register to occur, there must be an anchoring by fixation on the plane of the erogenous stimulus (Freudian Reiz). Thus, the projection of the bodily surface onto the symbolic plane is organized by erogenous inscriptions left by experiences with primordial figures during psychosexual development.
The mark is one of loss which, in being lost, funds difference (Schutt 2025). Marking the lack allows one to reckon with the loss and eventually to mourn. What I wish to emphasize is that such a mark is an effect of the inscription process of primary repression, which may be insufficient and may fade (de-memory). The structuring traces of this process remain under the action of the interplay of the drives. The death drive being effectively dis-objectalising and effacing of the primal object and its framing structure of cathexis.
Today the process of primal repression, as well as the operation of symbolic castration, is understood as subject to constant updating due to the fact that these are not isolated processes but mutually reinforcing ones. They are not complete or finished processes, there is always a rest. Secondary processes also act retroactively upon primary or founding processes (Goldstein 2026).
It is therefore useful to think of contemporary melancholizations as cases of a lack or fading in the force of erogenous inscriptions on the part of unstable or insufficiently libidinizing objects. These failed in the consistency necessary for original erotization and seduction, leaving the subject faded within a play of distorted mirages and endless projective identifications from which they cannot reposition themselves, because they do not have the coordinates that would fix a possible drive pathway. These are necessary cutouts and anchors in the erogenous body. Such a play of mirages/mirrors can be amplified in the virtual world by AI algorithms and intensify chaos and despair when the ego is not sufficiently constituted, in extreme cases reaching delusional constructions (AI-induced psychosis) or suicide as a way out—two tragedies staged in the film mentioned and real risks in cases such as those presented.
In this sense, I follow the ideas of the authors worked with here, who, among others, understand that the primary and secondary processes described by Freud are always being updated. This allows us to think of a practice of attempting to inscribe-repress that which could not be anchored at the time or where death drive unbinding and jouissance excesses seek binding to a possible representative. We would then move in the direction of working in favor of reediting and perhaps reinforcing both primary and secondary repression—and therefore of genuine necessary or essential oblivion distinct from the de-memory of the subject without traces or possible history. Not in vain does Lacan define neuroses as positions of existence (in relation to lack) and describes the analyst’s labor as that of being witnesses to a forgetting. A barred subject surges, not a barren one. Helping to inscribe that lack may be our current task. It involves enabling a position of existence, of being alive with and for our patients. This is the analyst’s drive-based wager and commitment.
This article is part “AI in My Mind,” a series about AI edited by Amy Levy.
About the Series:
AI has been in humanity’s mind for a long while. Much like the longing in James Taylor’s nostalgic song, “Carolina in my mind”—written while Taylor was in London missing North Carolina—humanity, in creating AI systems, is expressing a yearning for something that, like memories of a place from one’s past, exists only in the mind. The rich collection of human fantasies about AI, accessible through science fiction stories and films, both buttresses and distorts our current experiences with all too real AI systems. “AI in my mind” is an ongoing series that invites psychoanalytic thinkers to reflect on human desires and goals in creating AI, as well as the effects of real AI systems in our minds. Submissions are invited from psychoanalytic clinicians and scholars who are grappling with AI. During a time when AI is changing humankind, and evoking fear as well as hope, tensions mount and psychoanalytic engagement is challenging to sustain. “AI in my mind” offers us a place to slow down and use psychoanalytic thinking to process, understand, and react to this fast-moving creation.
About the Author:
Katharina Trebbau is a Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalyst at the Caracas Psychoanalytic Society (SPC). She is Director of SPC’s T(r)ópicos magazine, dedicated to advancing the psychoanalytic field, she is also a Member of the SPC’s Scientific Committee and has served as Executive Secretary. Dr. Trebbau is a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) and Latin American Psychoanalytic Federation (FEPAL). Readers can also follow her on her personal Substack at this link: Katharina
About the Editor:
Dr. Amy Levy is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. She chairs the American Psychoanalytic Association’s (APsA) President’s Commission on Artificial Intelligence (CAI), serves on the editorial board of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, and on the subcommittee “Artificial Intelligence” for the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA) committee, Psychoanalysis and Technology. Dr. Levy teaches and lectures internationally on the intersection of psychoanalysis and artificial intelligence, and is the author of The New Other: Alien Intelligence and the Innovation Drive. She maintains a private practice in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
References
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Freud, S. (1930). Civilization and its Discontents. S. E., 21.
Garcia Castiñeiros, J. (2018). Sobre el concepto de represión originaria, su actualización y transformaciones en análisis. Calibán Revista Latinoamericana de Psicoanálisis, Vol 16.
Green, A. (1998). The primordial mind and the work of the negative. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 79:649-665.
Green, A. (1983). Life Narcissism, Death Narcissism, trans. A. Weller. London: Free Association, 2001.
Green, A. (1995). El trabajo de lo negativo. Buenos Aires, AR: Amorrortu, 2003.
Goldstein, M. (2023). Trans-formaciones. Polisexualidades en el Malestar Sexual Actual. Buenos Aires, AR: Lugar Editorial.
Goldstein, M. (2026). Inhibición, Síntoma y Angustia: Congruencias e incongruencias con el Psicoanálisis Contemporáneo. Presentación online Formación Permanente 02/06/2026. APA.
Lacan, J. (1964). Seminario 11: Los cuatro conceptos fundamentales del psicoanálisis. 1era edición. Buenos Aires. Paidós, 2024.
Trebbau, K. (2026). “AI and the negation of the enigmatic.” The Psychoanalytic Quarterly Substack, Feb 21, 2026.
Winnicott, D. (1958). The capacity to be alone. International Journal of Psychoanalis, 39:416-420.
This paper was presented by presented by Katharina Trebbau at Jornadas de la Asociación Psicoanalítica Argentina: Depresiones en nuestro Tiempo: Malestar y Declive del deseo. June 26th-27th 2026 (an online event).
https://www.lydiamaltby.com/
Katharine Trebbau took a class with M. Goldstein, and the block quote is from the Trebbau’s class notes.