Aaron Neiman is a medical anthropologist studying the ways we seek, talk about, and conceive of therapy. His book project at KWI, “Psychic Retreats: The New Politics of Mental Health in the Global North”, explores the rise of computer-automated therapy programs and the changes they have brought to popular and scientific understandings of mental health. Bringing together science and technology studies, social and economic history, medical humanities, and multi-sited ethnography with the users and developers of these programs, it asks how human-to-human care is being reconfigured in the age of AI.
With a particular focus on critical studies of AI and the Global North, it asks how new computational technologies both afford new opportunities for healing while enabling those in wealthy societies to psychically “retreat” further inwards amid global polycrisis.
The project borrows from a wide range of theoretical traditions, including psychoanalysis, Marxist and anti-imperialist political economy, and philosophical explorations of human/machine relations. Source materials and data include original ethnographic fieldwork in Australia and Europe with digital mental health developers, in-depth interviews with users, and discursive analyses of popular media and scientific publications. Guiding this wide-ranging exploration of a new medical and communication paradigm is the overriding question: what, if anything, is truly unique about giving and receiving psychotherapy?