Artificial Intelligence (AI) has significantly advanced across diverse domains, notably healthcare and mental health. It has emerged as one of the most transformative technologies of the 21st-century, ranging from virtual assistants and recommendation systems to autonomous vehicles and clinical decision-support tools. As AI becomes increasingly woven into everyday life, it offers extraordinary opportunities for innovation and widened access to care, while simultaneously engendering profound risks: ethical concerns, security threats, job displacement, surveillance, bias, and the erosion of human connection. From a group-analytic perspective, AI must be understood not merely as a technical instrument but as a force that reshapes the matrix, reverberates through the social unconscious, and displaces the location of disturbance. This article — drawing on psychoanalytic, Jungian and group-analytic perspectives, is illustrated with clinical, training and organizational vignettes — argues that AI can be usefully conceptualized as a contemporary, cultural manifestation of the Trickster archetype—a boundary-crossing, shape-shifting figure that disrupts symbolic orders, destabilizes authority and exposes vulnerabilities within social, political and clinical matrices.
Stuart Stevenson (Wed,) studied this question.