Intimacy and Love with Artificial Intelligence in the Movie “Her”

Abstract

Psychotherapy is known to be performed only by humans until today. However, as technology develops and the widespread COVID-19 pandemic, there is an increase of human interaction with artificial intelligence recently. In this paper, we will discuss human-artificial intelligence relationships by looking at Theodore’s interaction with an operating system named Samantha in the movie “Her”. Through this, we will discuss how Samantha brings growth to Theodore and Samantha’s limitations in developing Theodore’s psyche. Samantha functioned partially as a transitional and selfobject and led Theodore to experience a different kind of object relations. She provided Theodore empathy. However, these object functions and empathy showed limitations.