When the market asks no price: AI chatbot interaction as psychic market disruption (opens in new tab)

The rapid adoption of AI chatbots for emotional support and quasi-therapeutic interaction raises questions that existing clinical and regulatory frameworks are not equipped to address. This Perspective applies the psychic arbitrage framework—which reconceptualizes defense mechanisms as energy-conversion operations on internal psychic markets—to analyze the specific transactional distortions produced by chatbot interaction. The framework identifies four dysfunctions: liquidity illusion (appare...