This research paper examines how the language of therapy, traditionally born of introspective exchange, has been reshaped by algorithmic systems and influencer cultures into a grammar of emotional performance. Drawing on Freud’s idea of repetition, Lacan’s discourse of the university, and Sara Ahmed’s affective economies, I trace how phrases from AI chatbots, Instagram reels, and self-help feeds seep into the everyday speech of Indian and diasporic patients. Words like "boundaries", "self-care", and "trigger" now signal psychological fluency, but often at the cost of real psychic work. In clinical sessions, these readymade phrases can momentarily soothe anxiety, even as they neutralize ambivalence. Digital infrastructures begin to hold emotion on our behalf, performing care and empathy in the absence of an actual person. Over time, they train people to recognize themselves through mechanical affirmations instead of the difficult labour of reflection. Methodologically, this paper moves between psychoanalytic case material and the study of digital traces to think about how therapy-speak travels as a transnational language of belonging across India and its diaspora. By positioning the therapeutic lexicon within the logics of platform capitalism, I suggest that affect today operates both as currency and as governance. Reading psychoanalysis as cultural critique, I ask what forms of desire, self-disclosure, and vulnerability remain possible when emotional life begins to speak in the voice of the algorithm.

Authors:
Lakshita Malhotra, The Color of Grey Cells, India

About the Presenter(s)
Lakshita Malhotra is a psychodynamic psychotherapist integrating psychoanalytic and body-based approaches. Her work focuses on identity, gender, sexuality, and diaspora, with an interest in how cultural and relational worlds shape psychic life.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lakshita-malhotra-7ab6a9297/

See this presentation on the full schedule – Tuesday Schedule

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