Systemic Therapy, Research and Education in the Age of Technology and AI

Dear EFTA members,

I recently participated online to a panel within the American Family Therapy  Academy Annual Congress. “Systemic Therapy, Research, and Education in the Age of Technology and AI” was the theme of the Congress and the representatives of International Associations were invited to discuss how we utilize AI. I participated with Dickson Chow vice president of the Asian Academy of Family Therapy who lives in Hong Kong and Andrew Sofin, President of the Canadian Association of Family Therapy. Absent the Representative of the Australian Association. We spoke of the utilization of AI in the field, in research, in psychology, in psychotherapy and in our lives. Fantastic the two chairpersons, Rinny and Man-Tso of whom I don’t remember the surnames.

I talked about the acceleration that AI has produced in this hypermodern era, in which we have modified the way of learning, playing, working, loving, deciding, speaking, relating to each other … Of the changes that it has produced: it changed the course of the river bed, as Wittgenstein would have said.

I talked about the potentialities it has for research purposes, for process outcome research, for topic analysis, for analysing videos and the therapeutic process (the dance between the professional and the system). The help it can offer in training, supervision and teaching. We have discussed how to utilize it in therapy, both as online sessions and as an aid for the therapeutic process (ChatGTP). I also stated what AI cannot do in therapy: build an authentic empathic relationship, manage dangerous crisis and at risk occurrences, offer a therapeutic path, make autonomous clinical decisions. We are still needed and I personally do not wish the time in which there will be a virtual psychotherapist!

Why am I telling you this? First because I represented EFTA, the Institutes and you all; secondly because I wish to open a discussion among Institutes and members on this subject in order to try and be proactive towards AI practices; thirdly because I wish to pass on the message that Jay Lebow – the former editor of Family Process – has suggested: the need to write as much as possible as systemic thinkers and practitioners what we are doing, in order to help AI devices to pass from being linear to become complex and circular, in a world where we struggle alphabetizing to systemic thinking and to complexity.

Do you utilize AI in teaching and supervising? In which ways? How could EFTA help you in this process of alphabetization? Are there some of you who could help others? You all know, I hope, that as EFTA we are organizing monthly Research cafés, we could think of enhancing the dialogue on AI techniques utilized in research.

Umberta Telfener,
EFTA President