WCSPP Film Night: A.I. Artificial Intelligence

2 CE Hours available to NYS LCSWs, LMSWs, LPs, LMFTs, LMHCs, LCATs, Psychologists and PsyDs

Watch the Movie before the Event – – then Join Us to Discuss!
You can stream the movie on many platforms including Google Play, Paramount+ and YouTube.

In our increasingly uncertain world, Steven Spielberg’s (2001) prescient film “AI: Artificial Intelligence” raises essential questions about the human condition as it depicts a society in which technologies have become so advanced that it’s hard to tell the difference between robots and humans. A modern Pinocchio story, it centers around a robot boy who has been programmed to love. Imprinted onto a human mother who ultimately abandons him, the boy sets off on a perilous journey hoping to become real.

As we grapple today with the humanization of machines and the mechanization of humans, the movie illustrates what can happen when the creations we’ve made to serve us threaten our being and identity. Through the lens of attachment, loss, fantasy and memory, we see the pain of perpetual longing, the search to heal unbearable aloneness, and the thin line between object usage and object love. It asks what it means to be authentically human in a vast, timeless universe, and suggests what might be truly reparative within the therapeutic relationship.

Judith Schweiger Levy, PhD, is a Faculty and Supervisor, WCSPP; Training and Supervising Analyst, Contemporary Freudian Society; Faculty, Supervisor, Manhattan Institute of Psychoanalysis; and Supervisor, Institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy. Dr. Levy has a Certificate in Psychoanalysis, NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and Contemporary Freudian Society.