On the couch with an AI robo-doc asking me very personal questions

How long have you been having these delusions?

Photo © 2024 Caleb Woods | https://unsplash.com/fr/@caleb_woods

“Tell me about your mother.”

I should have guessed that was coming. I am on a couch, being diagnosed by an AI psychiatrist.

Naturally it’s a virtual couch. Being British, I don’t own a ‘couch’ of my own in real life. I have various other types of soft furniture and even once considered buying one of those reclining armchairs which flip up a footstool, slice off your fingers and terrify the cat as you push back, but never a ‘couch’.

I’ve seen the actual article in Freud’s house in London, of course. It’s a very nice one. Freud did good couch.

But Freud was Austrian. Perhaps every Austrian has a couch and spends their private time sprawled across the cushions rather than sitting upright. Families of Austrians must have four or five couches in the living room just so they can watch TV at the same time.

Me, I’m on a settee.

Here in France, of course, I call it a sofa. If I told my neighbours I had put a ‘settee’ in my living room, they might assume I had installed equipment to scan the universe for alien life. I could use the correct French word canapé but I worry that my neighbours might not understand whether I am offering them somewhere to sit or something to eat.

“Tell me about your mother.”

That’s a psychoanalysis cliché, of course. Freud had a lot more to contribute to the formative practice of clinical psychology than Oedipus complexes and cigar jokes. Not my computerised robo-doc, unfortunately. It took just four questions for the inevitable insinuations of matris concubitum to kick in.