We are pleased to welcome Scott Koeneman, PsyD, to the CPOS Board of Directors. Scott is a practicing psychologist and psychoanalyst at the Mend Center for Psychotherapy in Overland Park, KS. He specializes in helping men connect with their emotions, helping leaders in times of personal or professional crisis, therapy for therapists, issues of sexuality, and issues of faith and spirituality. Scott joined the board in 2026.
A recent piece from The American Psychoanalyst (TAP) offers uncomfortable clarity on an increasingly ordinary AI practice. Messina opens with a familiar experience, asking an AI system to help her “find the right tone” for a letter to a long-time friend. The response is emotionally fluent and analytically impeccable yet her body recoils. Not because the machine did a poor job but because the letter is “perfect, and it felt like a lie”. Messina notes that patients describe these tools with “quiet gratitude” and “trust,” emphasizing that the system helps them feel less overwhelmed and less alone. This raises a critical question: What psychic work is being “bypassed—or perhaps displaced” when containment is outsourced to an AI? Real care isn’t just “getting it.” It’s taking in someone else’s mess, letting it affect you, and transforming it into something bearable. That costs attention, steadiness, and risk. Without cost, you get empathy cosplay.
Is AI the only place we see costless empathy?
Consulting is one of the cleanest institutional mirrors of costless empathy because the very act of being asked for help recruits the consultant into an expert position. In real relationships, we trust what’s costly because cost is hard to counterfeit: time, effort, awkward honesty, reputational risk, repair. Cheap empathy reads like spam because it can be mass-produced with no downside. That reframes the question from “Can AI be empathic?” to “Who’s actually on the hook?”
Read more"Tom Main, one of the British “Independents,” said of psychoanalysis that sitting behind a couch five times a week was only one of its applications." How do you use psychoanalysis?
What does social psychoanalysis look like as it is already being lived and practiced by clinicians, students, scholars and activists? Where is there forward momentum? Listen to a discussion between Lynne Layton, Marianna Leavy-Sperounis, and Lara Sheehi on the future of a social psychoanalysis.
Locating Winnicott within a broad landscape of critical scholarship that dissects work’s perils, Nathan Gerard's new book positions Winnicott as both a radical critic and creative advocate for building a different kind of work life—one that might make room for the presence of self.
By shuffling the discourse on neoliberal subjectivity to reclaim what Winnicott calls “unit status” of the separate self, Gerard differentiates Winnicott from the relational tradition by advocating for Winnicott’s non-relational aspects. Through such analysis, the book reveals how work and home have become two sides of the same impoverished coin, each contributing to a legitimately “bad environment” that perpetuates self-absence and annihilates one’s unique sense of “feeling real” and alive.