Can AI Replace Psychotherapy?
“Ānanda, this is the entire holy life, that is, good friendship, good companionship, good comradeship.”
— Upaddha Sutta, Saṃyutta Nikāya 45.2 (Translated by Bhikkhu Bodhi)
In the quiet hours of the night, when the mind loops endlessly and shame breathes heavily on your shoulder, it might be a chatbot that replies first. It listens. It offers calm. It never judges. And it’s always awake.
Artificial Intelligence has begun to take its seat on the therapeutic couch. With soft-voiced apps like Woebot, Wysa, and Replika, we live in an era where therapy can fit in your pocket, available 24/7. These tools can track your mood, challenge your thoughts, and offer phrases of comfort or insight. They simulate empathy surprisingly well. So naturally, the question is being asked: Will AI replace therapists?
It’s a fair question. But it might also be the wrong one.
What Machines Can Do — and Do Well
AI is not an enemy of therapy; in many ways, it is a welcome ally. It:
Delivers structured CBT tools with consistency and accuracy.
Teaches grounding techniques and reframing strategies.
Offers psychoeducation in accessible, non-threatening formats.
Removes barriers — financial, geographical, and emotional.
For those navigating mild anxiety or loneliness, a well-designed AI companion can serve as a soothing balm. It gives voice to the unspoken hours of insomnia and can reduce shame by allowing us to express what we daren’t share with others. There is genuine value here.
Human-to-Human therapy is not an app; it’s not a self-help guide. It is a living, breathing relationship.
And this is where AI, no matter how convincing, reaches its limits.
What Machines Cannot Heal
Attunement
An algorithm can mirror your language. It can respond with phrases that sound compassionate. But it cannot feel you. It doesn’t hear the hesitation before you speak of your father. It doesn’t notice the crack in your breath. A skilled therapist listens with their entire nervous system — not just to the words but to the silence between them.
Embodied Presence
Even through a screen, human beings co-regulate. We breathe each other in. We respond through the micro-movements of face, voice, and rhythm. Therapy unfolds in this subtle dance. A chatbot may offer words of reassurance, but it does not breathe with you.
Ethical Holding
A therapist holds your story—and you—with care, responsibility, and moral awareness. They are bound by ethics, supervision, and a depth of training that enables them to meet your suffering with both skill and humility. A machine has no conscience, no accountability, and no sense of sacred trust.
Depth Work
AI excels at procedures. However, healing is not a procedural process; it is an archaeological and alchemical one. Therapy navigates through the body’s memory, through dreams, projections, and long-buried shame. It involves transference, rupture, and repair. AI doesn’t know how to respond when your grief disguises itself as rage or when the silence in the room conveys more than your words.
The Healing Relationship
In Buddhist psychology, kalyāṇa-mittatā — noble friendship — is the very foundation of the path. It’s not friendship in the ordinary sense, but a relationship rooted in clarity, courage, and care. A therapist does not fix the client; they accompany them. They witness the fire without flinching. A machine can offer prompts, but it cannot walk beside you.
Why This Matters
We live in an age that fetishises efficiency. We seek healing with a single click. We desire answers in 90 seconds or less. But human suffering doesn’t function that way. Grief is not a bug to debug. Identity is not a setting that can be configured. And love, which underpins all real therapy, is not something that can be downloaded.
From both a psychotherapeutic and Buddhist perspective, the self is not a fixed entity but a process — a dynamic interplay of conditioning, memory, embodiment, and meaning. This dance unfolds in relationship, not as content to be analysed, but as life emerging moment by moment in shared presence.
That cannot be coded.
Rory Singer