Her-rare humanum est… Reply to the interventions by Riccardo Catanzaro and Artificial Intelligence

The call for a debate about the digital world and its connection to clinical practice attests to the need for continued discussion beyond merely technophilic or technophobic stances. My response to Catanzaro’s (2025) contribution seeks to reaffirm my starting premise for conceptualizing the digital phenomenon: that of the digital habitat. If we consider the digital world not within a subject/object dialectic but rather as a “substance” in which we are immersed, we lose the possibility of conceiving of a subjectivity that utilizes the Web to freely express parts of the self. This subjectivity is, on the contrary, “digitized” ab origine. From this, a series of new clinical phenomena emerges that must not be reduced to the category of technological addiction. Instead, they compel the clinician to acquire new hermeneutic lenses and adopt new modalities of being with the other. Finally, the editorial team’s inclusion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) expands the debate from the question of the subject to that of the machine. Before we address “what AI does”, we must first reflect on “what we perceive it to be”. Only then can we venture into the critical issue of why the human subjects experience the machine as an agentive entity capable of responding to their own malaise.

Keywords: Subjectivity; Artificial Intelligence; Technological addictions; Social networks; Digital

Riccardo Marco Scognamiglio, Her-rare humanum est… Commento agli interventi di Riccardo Catanzaro e dell’Intelligenza Artificiale in "PSICOTERAPIA E SCIENZE UMANE" 3/2025, pp 451-462, DOI: 10.3280/PU2025-003005