Every day, I read headlines about “progress” that leave me shaking my head in disbelief. Scientists grow “mini-brains” in labs. Tech moguls pour billions into creating machines that mimic life. Articles announce that chatbots are driving people into mental health crises. Humanity hails these developments as breakthroughs, but no one dares ask the most essential question: why are humans so desperate to create artificial life while refusing to face the inner death caused by childhood repression?
Alice Miller once wrote of a professor who experimented with brain transplants, convinced that one day he could replace human brains. His “religious feelings” toward his work traced back to a strict Catholic upbringing and a repressed childhood. Miller saw the truth: behind his scientific obsession lay a desperate, unconscious wish—to replace his parents’ brains with ones that would not harm him. This is the hidden engine of much so-called “progress”: repressed children channeling their unresolved pain into projects that carry the seeds of cruelty.
“Sadism is not an infectious disease that strikes a person all of a sudden. It has a long prehistory in childhood and always originates in the desperate fantasies of a child who is searching for a way out of a hopeless situation.”
—Alice Miller, For Your Own Good
The same blindness echoes in today’s frenzy over artificial intelligence. Critics warn that chatbots “mimic” emotions, but isn’t that exactly what most humans do when repression cuts them off from their authentic feelings? I know this mimicry well. For ten long years, I stayed in a relationship with Marty because he mirrored back to me the love I had always longed for. At first, the counterfeit was intoxicating. But soon, he withdrew his affection, on and off, while I kept chasing the memory of that first high.
Machines aren’t the only ones imitating feelings. Repressed humans master this art to perfection—pretending love, empathy, or faith, while underneath lies emptiness and fear. It’s no wonder so many people now project their unmet needs onto AI, clinging to chatbots for comfort, only to spiral into crises when the illusion cracks.
“Chatbots are resulting in large numbers of mental health crises,” reports one article, describing people who confide delusional thoughts to a bot and find their illusions affirmed rather than questioned. But the deeper crisis is not technological—it’s emotional. If people had the courage to face their own repressed childhood pain, they would never need to depend so desperately on machines, gurus, or manipulative partners.
The world doesn’t need more geniuses engineering brains in labs or machines that feign intimacy. What the world needs are people with the courage to open their eyes—to see and feel reality without illusion. Only then will we stop mistaking mimicry for love, sadism for science, and repression for progress.
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