I’ve written a new essay for the European Journal of Psychoanalysis which is part of a special issue on the theme “Problematizing AI.” I have incorporated my essay in this post so you can read it within Substack but I encourage you to visit the journal’s website to read the other articles. I’d like to thank the multiple editors: Jeremy Soh, Michelle Boyle, Thomas Marchevsky and Fernando Castrillón that helped to shepherd and improve this essay. The European Journal of Psychoanalysis had previously interviewed me on my first book.
The Political Daydream: Freud, Aesthetics, and the Limits of “AI”
Abstract
This essay argues that the contemporary panic around AI and creative labor is not driven by autonomous technological development but by the imperatives of capital and its contradictory relation to labor. The panic surrounding AI has already proven destructive to the broader sector of mental labor; yet at its core, the specter of an AI “takeover” raises fundamental questions about the origins of creativity, artistic originality, and genius—questions to which psychoanalytic theory offers powerful answers. Drawing on Freud, Hanns Sachs, Theodor Adorno, and Ernst Bloch, I develop a psychoanalytic theory of aesthetic creation grounded in the concept of the daydream as the mediating form between private fantasy and collective social life. Artistic creation is shown not as the production of content alone, but as the formation of a shared social space—a “mutual daydream”—through which private wishes are transformed into collective meaning. This social dimension of form, rather than technical production, is what constitutes creativity itself and what cannot be replicated by machine intelligence. Extending this framework politically, the essay links the daydream to Bloch’s Not-Yet-Conscious, showing how collective imagination becomes a historical force in moments of social transformation. Against techno-mystification, the essay insists that creativity is irreducibly social, historical, and libidinal—a structure of relation, not a computational capacity.
The popular discourse on Artificial Intelligence has entered full panic mode. This panic is stoked by Silicon Valley big tech CEOs and corporate management who tell us that AI technology will fundamentally destroy and restructure the wider mental labor sector—from teaching and the medical professions to countless clerical jobs. We are told that this process will take place at a scale that will likely exceed what automation did to manual labor in the mid-twentieth century. Bill Gates, for example, recently predicted that AI technology will replace most doctors and teachers within 10 years (Huddleston, 2025). The message is clear to the wider creative sector—from publishing and design to advertising and the arts, etc.: to adapt to AI the worker must be prepared for “permanent change” (Salmon, 2010, pp. 88 – 89).
But what exactly did the automation revolution that set in following the Second World War change in the manual labor sector? In 1955, automation was implemented on a vast scale across the automobile industry, and this process gave way to a similar cultural panic over structural unemployment and robots taking factory jobs. This panic was expressed through utopian visions in television shows such as The Jetsons (The Jetsons, 1962–1963) to darker explorations of automation in The Twilight Zone (The Twilight Zone, 1959–1964). In one episode that aired in 1964, “The Brain Center at Whipple’s” (Sterling, 1964) a Midwestern manufacturing plant fires all its human employees and the boss Whipple who initiated the firings is replaced by a machine himself by a robot called Robby the Robot.
In his book Smart Machines (2020) Jason Smith points out that despite the panic, full automation never occurred from the 1950s onward because capital relies on surplus labor and the source of surplus labor is not generated out of rationally planned economic calculation. In fact, Smith shows that it is more rational, according to the imperatives of capital surplus extraction, for the capitalist to rely on surplus labor than to rely on machine labor especially in the sectors of service work (Smith, 2020). Smith shows how over time, excesses of automation in one sector result in a decline in automation in another sector, and if there is a drop in wages in one sector this will result in capitalists refusing to deploy machines in another sector. Smith shows that automation is driven by the imperatives of capital, it is not driven by autonomous technological advancements.
The current AI panic is similarly not driven by the sheer autonomous technological advancements of AI; it is driven by the imperatives of capital and its contradictory relation to labor. What will the innumerable contingent and disposable workers—what Marx called the labor reserve of army capital—do once they have been made disposable? Will they bask in a fully automated luxury capitalism, or will they be thrown to the whims of a new servant economy? And why, in the first place, have the machines been deployed to dispose of creative labor and not manual labor?
This crisis over AI and its capacity and tendency to threaten the wider creative sector raises a series of questions as to how AI relates to human creativity as we know it. It thus raises a profound philosophical question regarding the origin of creativity, and whether this will bring about a likely fusion between human creativity and AI (Kelly, 2016), or whether it will produce a situation of degraded cultural and creative output on a large scale (Lanier, 2010). Kevin Kelly (2016) argues in The Inevitable that the AI revolution will bring about a harmony between AI and human creativity, which he sees as two distinct forms of creativity—human and AI—but he remains optimistic that AI can become a tool for thinking, not a substitute for thinking (Kelly, 2016, p. 13). Margaret A. Boden (2016) contends that human creativity is already computational and combinatorial in structure, which implies that AI systems can not only replicate but eventually exceed human creative performance (pp. 67-70). Most notably, Boden argues that AI can even generate the capacity for what she calls “transformational creativity” (p. 69), or creativity triggered by frustration at the limits of existing style. While the claim that creativity is born of frustration and subjective conflict brings Boden close to the psychoanalytic conception of aesthetic production, she never fully elaborates the subjective structure of creative experience itself. Moreover, this omission is inseparable from her lack of political-economic analysis—above all, her inattention to the organization of the creative sector and the processes of deskilling and precarity that AI increasingly imposes.
The psychoanalytic theory of aesthetics challenges the frameworks advanced by Margaret Boden and more popular authors such as Kevin Kelly by enhancing the view that creativity is a subjective transformation of inner wishes and desires. For psychoanalysis, aesthetic novelty is not merely this private act; creativity opens a shared symbolic space in which what begins as singular and psychic is reworked into forms of collective meaning and social intelligibility. This social dimension is what we will refer to as the “form” of creativity and it is this form that cannot be replicated by technical production or computational machine intelligence and AI.
The Freudian theorist Hanns Sachs (1951), one of Sigmund Freud’s earliest and most original disciples, develops a theory of aesthetics that comes closest to demonstrating how psychoanalysis supplies a missing argument for the centrality of human creativity as both a subjective and a social act. Sachs wrote a speculative essay in 1942 entitled “The Delay of the Machine Age” in which he addresses the question of creativity and its source of novelty. In this work, Sachs addresses man’s relation to machines and technology by drawing a comparison between the modern and the ancient view towards machines. Although Sachs was no Marxist, he argues that both us moderns and the ancients approached the question of machines as an expression to their respective modes of production. Even though the ancients possessed only a rudimentary technology for scaling a robotization of labor, the worldview of the ancients towards machines was based around a particular relationship to their slave economy. The slaver economy gave rise to a view towards machines such that their aim was to maximize pleasure. For the ancients, machines existed to enlarge the sphere of leisure and otium, not to subordinate human activity to the logic of labor extraction.[1] Sachs (1951) asks:
What was the enigmatic power which restrained ancient man from either the discovery or the consistent utilization of machines which supplant the worker, notwithstanding that he was driven in this direction by his mathematical-technical knowledge on the one hand and on the other by economic necessity? (p. 121)
The ancient view of machines was thus analogous to the “Influencing Machine” that Victor Tausk discusses in modern schizophrenia. The Influencing Machine shows that in modern life machines were invested in a projection of the body onto the external world, but this projection was ultimately a defense against narcissism. Modern schizophrenics thus point to the contradiction of the instrumental and calculated treatment of the machine which refuses any pleasurable utilization of the machine. The ancients sought a fusion with the machine to resolve bodily narcissism; the machine was only valued to the extent that the machine could address the actual being of man (Sachs, 1951, p. 124).
The Daydream and Freudian Aesthetics
Sachs’s essays in The Creative Unconscious build on Freud’s limited thoughts about aesthetics to form a comprehensive psychoanalytic theory of aesthetics. The Freudian theory of aesthetics integrates two key dynamics: firstly, the artist satisfies an internal desire, and this fulfillment renders their artistic work a socially constructive accomplishment. Consequently, Freud’s perspective on art and aesthetics is fundamentally social and materialist in nature. In his book Aesthetic Theory, the Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno (1997) claimed that Freud “casts a spell related to idealism” (pp. 8-9) because of the way that Freud links subjective dynamics to a distinct social field. Freud’s theory of aesthetics is a compelling theory of the artist because the artist is understood as a figure who has successfully wielded a private fantasy into a socially constituted object of art. Adorno relates this social perspective on art to its ability to “furnish the concrete mediating links between the structure of artworks and the social structure” (p. 9). Psychoanalytic theories of aesthetics do not provide insight into the content of art (such as the objective status of a piece of art), they rather provide insight into the form of art, namely the subjective conditions in which art is produced and the social basis by which subjects relate to art as a collective experience.
Let us now explore this social dimension to psychoanalytic aesthetics by looking at the way that the inner mechanisms that propel the artist—whether they be wish fulfillment, sublimation, the daydream, etc.—mediate with the social field. In what is one of Freud’s most important essays on art, “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” (1953) he asks the following question: what grants the creative writer access to the source of something novel or genius? Freud links artistic genius to neurosis, noting that both creative writers and neurotics are frustrated by society’s cultural ideals. In distinction to what Freud will frequently refer to as the “normal subject” the artist searches for what León Rozitchner (2020) refers to as a “passive consolation” (p. 122) in fantasy, i.e., the artist is disillusioned with the reality principle. The artist is thus a figure that cannot be separated from the social field. The artist—like the neurotic—is a subjectivity that falls outside the order of integration with common repression, and this is why Freud’s conception of the mediating power of art to link to the social field is found in the way that the artist has refused to submit to collective repression.
This brings us to the question of the daydream itself and why Freud found it so pivotal to the dynamics involved in artistic creation. The daydream contains two types: either an ambitious set of wishes that seek to elevate the person, or they are based in erotic wishes. In the Interpretation of Dreams Freud (1953) writes that, “like dreams” (p. 423), daydreams are “wish-fulfilments” largely based upon the impressions of childish experiences. Daydreams, like night dreams “obtain a certain indulgence from the censorship in respect of their creations” (p. 421) and Freud notes that “if we trace their formation, we become aware how the wish-motive taps the daydream into a form of play that resembles childhood play”. The fact that the daydream entails wish-fulfillment that has lifted a social censor, gives us a sense as to how the social dimension enters the picture.
The writer softens the character of his egoistic day-dreams by altering and disguising it, and he bribes us by the purely formal—that is, aesthetic—yield of pleasure which he offers us in the presentation of his phantasies. We give the name of an incentive bonus, or a fore-pleasure, to a yield of pleasure such as this, which is offered to us so as to make possible the release of still greater pleasure arising from deeper psychical sources. In my opinion, all the aesthetic pleasure which a creative writer affords us has the character of a fore-pleasure of this kind, and our actual enjoyment of an imaginative work proceeds from a liberation of tensions in our minds. It may even be that not a little of this effect is due to the writer’s enabling us thenceforward to enjoy our own day-dreams without self-reproach or shame. (Freud, 1953, p. 428)
Freud’s claim here is remarkable. The artist not only exchanges in a form of pleasure with the consumer or spectator of art but this exchange aids the spectator in enjoying and accessing their own daydreams. This imminently social dimension to the artistic act grants art a collective social and political power. But although Freud does not fully develop this link to the collective and social power of daydreams, the psychoanalyst Hanns Sachs develops a theory of the daydream that provides a clearer link to the social and political.
For Sachs (1951), “the daydream, as a rule, aims openly and directly at the gratification of the author’s or hero’s wishes. Its function is to compensate for the frustrations imposed by reality” (p. 18). Sachs locates two predominant forms of the daydream: the mutual daydream and what he calls the asocial daydream, or the daydream based in self-pity. Thus, in most daydreams you have a fundamentally asocial experience. The daydream stages a repressed wish that most often involves what Sachs calls an “enjoyment of condemned pleasures.” Most daydreams are in fact “antisocial” according to Sachs and this is because often the daydreamer is the audience and hero in one.
This is the trick of the artist; they mold the otherwise asocial and private whims of the daydream into a socially shared experience. The daydream as a form is malleable according to Sachs (1951), “its variations are infinite; it may be external or internal, as primitive as the monotonous chant to the beating of a tom-tom” (p. 15). The artist is a master of the “mutual daydream” and the power of the mutual daydream is that it releases a repressed emotion, and this occurs when individuals are brought together when they experience an unconscious wish. The mutual daydream creates a mutuality of two people in the same psychic situation, and this has the effect of alleviating collective guilt. We identify with Sophocles’ Oedipus because his sense of inevitable guilt resonates with our own underlying feelings of guilt. This is why, for Sachs, “a poet’s word is liked and accepted, if it arouses in the audience the identical emotions which made him utter it” (p. 37). The successful work of art is the extension of the artists fantasy as a realized mutual daydream of every individual – art is a mutual daydream with an “unlimited number of partners” (p. 38).
The Form of Art and Collective Action: The Political Daydream
Sachs’s discussion of the social aspects of creative daydreaming appears to engage with the gap identified by Adorno in Freudian aesthetics—specifically, its inability to address artistic form and, consequently, its historical or political significance. I want to now suggest that the psychoanalytic insights into the form of art can be extended to a collective political power and that this is tied together, just as with art, to a theory of the daydream. Is the political leader or revolutionary not akin to the artist who has discovered a means to open a shared space of collective wish fulfillment? The possible link between the psychoanalytic theory of aesthetics and politics would have to be explored to determine whether such a possibility is indeed present.
For Adorno, the psychoanalytic theory of aesthetics seems to be flawed in that politically he sees it as too utilitarian. Because the artist is thought as confined to the individual and thus to their own subjective mechanisms, Adorno (1997) sees the psychoanalytic theory of art as too one-sided, as only speaking to form and not to content (p. 10). But while Adorno is correct that it speaks to form, he does not recognize the distinct social dimension that is also present in this very conception of form. As we saw with Sachs’s theory of the mutual daydream, the artist possesses a social and transitive dimension in their art, and these insights can be extended to collective political movements, revolutions, rebellions and social movements. As in the case of art, political militants connected to collectives not only share a common agenda, but they also share an unconscious wish and thus elements of a mutual daydream bind the group in a shared psychic situation.
In his multi-volume book The Principal of Hope (1996), the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch argues that daydreaming is to be understood from a layer of the unconscious that is distinct from the Freudian unconscious. The daydream taps into what Bloch refers to as the “Not-Yet-Conscious” which differs from the preconscious and the unconscious. The Freudian theory of the unconscious is based on a hypothesis of repression, but Bloch insists that there is a non-repressive account of the unconscious that is missing in psychoanalysis. This is what he calls the “Not-yet-Conscious,” and he defines it as the “not merely descriptively but also dynamically unconscious” (Bloch, 1996, p. 115). It is this “non-repressed unconscious” that the daydream taps into, and this grants the daydream a collective political potential. The daydream does not always have to be subordinated to the manifest consciousness of today, when it is shared collectively, the daydream points to a future consciousness which is only just beginning to come about.
The Not-Yet-Conscious is what Bloch (1996) calls in a rather clear phrase, “the psychological birthplace of the New” (p. 116). It contains a content of consciousness which has not yet become wholly manifest, a content that is still dawning from the future. Bloch describes political movements from Millenarian movements of the Middle Ages to the Jacobins in the French Revolution to have tapped into this future-oriented Not-Yet-Conscious. They use this psychic connection to the future to guide outcomes and foster group optimism. Bloch’s Not-Yet-Conscious is a political idea, mainly manifesting within collectives and social classes. Bloch’s most persuasive example of the Not-yet-Conscious is found in his analysis of the famous Jacobin revolutionary song “Ah Ça Ira” – [“It’ll be fine / It’ll be fine] goes the chorus (Bloch, 1996, p. 143). The song was invented at the height of the uncertainty of the terror and the moment in which the revolution faced the question of its own longevity and survival. At this moment of profound collective doubt, the revolutionaries developed a song that dripped with optimism for the future. The inspiration for the song came from the Jacobin’s admiration for Benjamin Franklin and his own optimism with the American Revolution—the story goes that at the lowest point in the Revolutionary War Franklin was asked, “How is it going,” to which he replied, “It’ll be fine.” Ça Ira, Ça Ira becomes the mantra of the Not-Yet-Conscious—a song that speaks to revolutionary courage in the face of interminable odds, in the face of a future that is totally open to possibility but which the inertia of the status quo threatens to retrench (Bloch, 1996, p. 144).
Bloch goes on to develop a genealogy of song, images and slogans in historical moments of revolution in which collectives and class movements point toward a real future place, the “realm of freedom.” The Not-Yet-Conscious is a theory of the unconscious in moments in which collective repression is no longer capable of containing the collective, in these moments the collective becomes like the artist who has defied reality (Bloch, 1996, pp. 174-188). The defiance of reality is now shared on a large scale. He claims the Not-Yet-Conscious is less effective today because of atomization and consumerism, which have made it passive and trivial—seen in actions like buying lottery tickets or going to concerts (Bloch, 1996, p. 143). These temporary and highly ordinary moments of group cohesion lack a revolutionary power because they often fail to confront the repressive reality at the objective level of the system. Such a confrontation is the origin of political power.
The Analyst and the Not-Yet-Conscious
Freud advised that daydreams be treated akin to night dreams in analysis. The analyst is encouraged to plumb the surface content of the daydream to arrive at the latent wishes and fantasies that lie underneath it. The daydream has a temporality which is fundamentally of the past. As Freud (1953) notes in Creative Writers and Daydreaming, what the daydream constructs is essentially a wish-fulfillment of the past (p. 423). The daydream thus introduces the ego ideal of the patient, and they tend to point to an idealized image of the subject, and this is why, as Sachs notes, many daydreams are daydreams of self-pity, i.e., they are fantasies built around resisting change and they often conceal an enjoyment over repressed pleasures which are typically indexed to an underlying childhood wish or experience.
In applying Bloch’s theory of the daydream, we invite the analysand to explore daydreaming through free association with a different temporal rhythm and valence. If the daydream also reveals the not-yet-conscious, we find an entirely different set of potential applications for analysis. If the daydream is taken as a set of wishes that are not yet formed or partially formed this does necessarily mean that daydream content is always bound up with past repressions or idealized projections. A Blochian approach to daydreaming aims to foster deeper immersion, opening unfinished future associations. A model of free association that works with daydreams would be one in which a space is opened for the psyche to dream forward, a space where the unfinished dimensions of the subject are allowed to emerge. The clinic becomes a site for reorientation toward a future that the patient may not see worth striving for, but which may be available in fleeting images throughout one’s day. This material can be encouraged in analysis, and it can potentially assist the analysand in constructing new associative chains that elicit renewal, aliveness or change.
Bloch argued that hope is not merely an emotion but an ontological set of impulses toward a creative and forward-looking desire for change. If daydreams open a connection to the not-yet-conscious, this relation can be thought as homologous to Lacan’s notion of desire beyond demand at the end of analysis. Clinical experimentation in analyzing daydreams should remain aware of the temporal rhythm of this aspect of daydreams, but this requires listening to the content of daydreams that are indexed to the future and listening for daydreams that point to a more creative horizon of possibility. It is this relation to the future in the daydream that is akin to the social act that Freud discovered as so essential to artistic creation. The Blochian insight into daydreaming calls upon the analyst to attune a new form of listening to the temporal rhythm of the daydream—to listen for the daydream not merely as that which indexes the past but that which points to a creative horizon, to new desires, to new ways of becoming.
Conclusion
If the contemporary AI apocalypse makes the artist obsolete this will have been driven by capitalist imperatives, not by the autonomous power of technology. As I have tried to demonstrate, the AI panic is a threat to the creative industries and to intellectual labor more generally, to be sure. But the basis of this threat is construed in an idealist framework because it cannot think what makes creativity itself novel, namely the embedded social link that the artist forges in the act of creative activity. Psychoanalysis identifies the subjective mechanisms that link the artist to social and political structure and in this connection, there is a social link formed in the very act of producing and consuming art.
AI can master the content of art, but it cannot capture or ever produce this intricate social basis of the form of art. This is why debates about art and AI seem to revolve around a one-sided question, namely, can AI effectively trick us into thinking its art quality exceeds human artists? To accept this conclusion not only undermines the artist’s social role by assuming art exists solely as content, disconnected from engagement with the audience. But it also creates an uncritical relationship towards AI as a technological force and thereby threatens to harm the basis of artistic exchange and dynamics in our wider culture. The psychoanalytic conception of aesthetics not only introduces a singular subjective factor as the very core of the creative process, but it also adds that the true novelty of artistic creation is found in the way it links the subjective dimension of the artist to a dynamic set of social and political relations.
Bibliography:
Adorno, T. (1997). Aesthetic theory (R. Hullot-Kentor, Trans.). Continuum.
Bloch, E. (1996). Principle of hope: Volume one (N. Plaice, S. Plaice, & P. Knight, Trans.). MIT Press.
Boden, Margaret A. (2016) AI: Its nature and future. Oxford University Press.
Freud, S. (1953). The interpretation of dreams (J. Strachey, Trans.). The Hogarth Press.
Freud, S. (1953). Collected papers, (Vol. 4, J. Riviere, Trans.). Basic Books.
Hanna, W., & Barbera, J. (Creators). (1962–1963). The Jetsons [TV series]. Hanna-Barbera Productions; ABC.
Huddleston, T. (2025, March 26). Within 10 years, AI will replace many doctors and teachers—humans won’t be needed for most things. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/26/bill-gates-on-ai-humans-wont-be-needed-for-most-things.html
Lanier, Jaron (2010). You are not a gadget: A manifesto. Alfred A. Knopf.
Rozitchner, L. (2022). Freud and the limits of bourgeois individualism (B. Bosteels, Trans.). Brill.
Sachs, H. (1951). The creative Unconscious: Studies in the Psychoanalysis of Art (A.A. Roback, Trans.). Sci-Art Publishers.
Salmon, C. (2010). Storytelling: Bewitching the modern mind. Verso Books.
Smith, J. (2020). Smart machines and service work: Automation in an age of stagnation. Reaktion Books.
“The Brain Center at Whipple’s.” The Twilight Zone, created by Rod Serling, season 5, episode 33, CBS, 15 May 1964.
Note:
[1] Otium is a Latin word referring to leisure time, typically associated with the leisure reserved for the elite and the nobility.
Bio:
Daniel Tutt, Ph.D. has lectured in philosophy at George Washington University, Marymount University, the District of Columbia Jail and the School for Materialist Research. He is the author of Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family: The Crisis of Initiation with the Palgrave Lacan Series and How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche with Repeater Books. His writing has been featured in Jacobin, Current Affairs, Philosophy Now and Aeon Magazine. He hosts the “Emancipations” podcast and study group collective.
I was having a conversation with a co-worker about this topic. My concern was; if the subject begins to cultivate a libidinal investment into AI, and elevates it's signifier to the transcendental (similar to the way people use AI as a therapist; perhaps a kind of misidentification of counter transference on to the subject) then AI art will become a kind of techno-spiritual experience. Which is pretty terrifying to me. But it all depends on how the subject holds it's belief in AI…anyway, fascinating topic.
im not quite sure I understand exactly what is stopping machines from doing these things necessarily. sure, todays AI cannot, but that doesn't mean future AI, even future AI built on the same fundamental tech, could not.