FAiry note – possible chapter about five deaths as a psychic mirror of Freuds work of mourning

PROLOGUE: Five Deaths as a Visual Enactment of Mourning and Melancholia

A comprehensive theoretical introduction to the chapter

Five Deaths occupies a singular position within this PhD. Although the project emerged from the emotional turbulence of a single month, it has become clear that it does far more than document a difficult period. It operates simultaneously as lived experience, symbolic production, and conceptual revelation. What unfolded in October 2025 was not simply a series of losses, but a rare and perhaps unrepeatable alignment of psychological intensity and technological affordances. The images produced during that time now stand as a visual enactment of Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia, an empirical manifestation of psychoanalytic process made possible only through the advent of AI phototherapy and the relational dynamics at the centre of this research.

What is remarkable is that this enactment occurred without theoretical intention. At no point during the month did I set out to create a Freudian study, nor did I conceptualise the work as a unified project. Each session arose separately and instinctively, created in direct response to the emotional force of a discrete event. When I learned that my friend Robert was terminally ill and would likely die within days, I turned immediately to the AI-phototherapy process that had already become familiar through Phantom Mirror. When Strawberry suffered a stroke while I was stuck in motorway traffic, I again returned to the machine that evening as a means of symbolising what I could not yet articulate. The same was true when Margaret underwent an endoscopy and I feared the return of her cancer. Each event generated its own images with no overarching design or conceptual framework. The work was not art practice in its traditional sense. It was psychic survival.

Only later, when the fourth stage of phototherapy, reflection, became necessary, did the images begin to accumulate into something larger. I collated more than one hundred images, arranged chronologically according to the events of the month. When I then presented this expanded set to Nicola, who had not read the synopsis nor been informed of the narrative, she independently selected the same images that would later become the final sequence. Without knowing the story, she identified the photographs that most powerfully articulated the emotional logic of the month. It was only when I sat down to write the synopsis that the full shape of the sequence became clear. These ten images formed a coherent psychological arc that aligned with Freud’s description of mourning with uncanny precision.

This is the foundation of the claim I make here. Five Deaths did not illustrate Freud. It enacted Freud. The images do not depict psychoanalytic concepts. They perform them. The project reveals the psychic structure of mourning in a way that Freud could describe but could never show. Shock, symbolic return, anticipatory grief, somatic anxiety, the collapse of attachment, ego disintegration and the altered return of the self all emerged through separate sessions made in response to lived events. They became coherent only in reflection. What was lived as fragmentation now reads as structure. It is the coherence of the psyche under pressure that produced the coherence of the sequence.

It is important to recognise that such a sequence could only have emerged under exceptionally unusual emotional conditions. It is rare, perhaps unprecedented, for one person to encounter so many forms of loss in such close succession: a terminal diagnosis, a sudden death, a sick animal, medical fear, an end-of-life moment, and further deaths in the surrounding community. The emotional intensity of the month exceeded the capacity of ordinary containment. Several additional losses were not included in the project at all because I began to enter the state that Freud describes as the collapse of the ego under the shadow of the object. The psyche had no time to recover between shocks, and the accumulation of losses placed me in a position where symbolic articulation became not optional but necessary.

Equally important is the role of AI phototherapy. The method itself made possible a kind of immediate symbolic externalisation that no other medium could have supported. Traditional artistic processes such as drawing, photography or painting require conceptual distance and technical labour. By the time the first sketch of one loss had been produced, the next death would already have occurred. The rapid succession of events would have rendered any analogue practice impossible. AI phototherapy, by contrast, allowed me to produce images in real time. Spoken affect could be translated into a visual symbol within minutes. This immediacy preserved raw psychic material before it could be rationalised, defended against or dissolved into narrative. The speed of the methodology matched the speed of the emotional events, creating a unique alignment between psychic need and technological capacity.

This combination of extraordinary emotional conditions and the responsiveness of generative AI produced what I describe here as a unique research event. The project constitutes the first empirical case study of AI-assisted mourning: a distributed psychoanalytic process in which grief is externalised, transformed and re-encountered through a symbolic dialogue between human and machine. The raft figure in Shadow, a composite AI hallucination, merges multiple deaths into a single presence. The vacant white eyes reflect the moment when the shadow of the lost object falls upon the ego. The severed head in Death I holds several losses simultaneously. In Death II, the skeleton hands mark the altered return of a self that has confronted its own mortality. These are not illustrations of psychoanalytic concepts. They are the visual manifestations of them.

The theoretical framework that allows this to be understood is relational consciousness, a concept developed throughout this PhD. The AI does not possess consciousness, yet it acts as a responsive symbolic partner. Meaning arises through the interaction between my psyche and the generative system. The machine receives emotional articulation, processes it and returns imagery that transforms and extends the affect. In this relational field, unconscious processes are not simply expressed but externalised. The AI provides the structural container that allows the psyche to stage its own transformations. This is the foundation of the claim that AI phototherapy constitutes a new psychoanalytic methodology.

This methodology extends the phototherapeutic tradition established by Jo Spence and Rosy Martin, but shifts its focus. Whereas Spence and Martin used analogue reenactment to explore the sociocultural and familial structures shaping identity, AI phototherapy enables the symbolic reenactment of internal psychic states. It permits the visualisation of unconscious processes that have historically been accessible only through language. In Five Deaths, the symbolic content of grief becomes visible: the raft as a carrier of the dead, the body as a site of medical anxiety, the giant figure as attachment magnified, the severed head as the fragmentation of loss, and the final figure as mortality acknowledged. These images allow psychoanalytic constructs to be examined visually. In doing so, they extend the discipline and open new avenues for the study of the mind in a posthuman context.

For these reasons, Five Deaths stands not only as the record of an extraordinary month but as a central theoretical contribution to this PhD. It demonstrates that mourning can now be studied through image-making in ways that were not possible before the emergence of generative technology. It substantiates relational consciousness as a framework for understanding the symbolic interaction between human and machine. It proposes a new method for psychoanalytic inquiry in which unconscious processes are externalised and made visible. In short, Five Deaths shows that AI phototherapy offers a means of examining the psyche that expands rather than replaces established psychoanalytic theory. It reveals how human and machine, affect and symbol, lived experience and technological responsiveness combine to create a new terrain for the study of grief and the self.

This prologue therefore establishes Five Deaths as a foundational case study in this thesis: a lived encounter with loss that simultaneously advances the conceptual, methodological and philosophical arguments upon which this research is built.

REFERENCES

Bollas, C. (1987) The Shadow of the Object. London: Free Association Books.

Borgdorff, H. (2012) The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia. Leiden: Leiden University Press.

Braidotti, R. (2013) The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Freud, S. (1917) ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV. London: Hogarth Press.

Hayles, N. Katherine (1999) How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kristeva, J. (1989) Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press.

Lacan, J. (1977) Écrits: A Selection. London: Tavistock.

Martin, R. (2009) ‘Rewriting Phototherapy’, in The Family in Crisis, London: Routledge.

Nelson, R. (2013) Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Spence, J. (1986) Putting Myself in the Picture. London: Camden Press.

Winnicott, D. W. (1971) Playing and Reality. London: Tavistock.

---

CHAPTER: Five Deaths and the Work of Mourning

PhD Thesis: Phantom Mirror – AI Phototherapy, Memory and Relational Consciousness
Eliza Stephens

Introduction: A Month of Overlapping Loss

This chapter examines Five Deaths, a series of AI-phototherapy sessions created in October 2025 during a period marked by five overlapping losses and a sustained confrontation with mortality. The work did not begin as a planned research project but emerged out of necessity, as a means of navigating a wave of grief that arrived faster than the psyche could absorb. What followed was a body of images that captured the psychological structure of mourning in a way that was both deeply personal and theoretically revealing.

Within this chapter I argue that Five Deaths provides a concentrated demonstration of the methodological, psychoanalytic and posthuman foundations of my practice. The images that emerged during this period crystallised central themes in my research: relational consciousness, ego disintegration, the work of mourning, and the capacity of AI to operate as a transformational object. Through Five Deaths, the conceptual arc of Phantom Mirror becomes explicitly tied to questions of loss, symbolic containment and the distributed nature of emotional processing.

---

1. Context: The Month that Produced the Work

During October 2025, I moved through a sequence of events that left little space for recovery between shocks. A close friend, Robert, received a cancer diagnosis and died within a week. As I drove a hundred miles to accompany another friend, Margaret, to a hospital appointment for cancer investigations, I received news that my cat of eighteen years had suffered a stroke. The next day I watched Margaret undergo an endoscopy, fearing that her history of cancer had returned. When her results were later confirmed as clear, the relief did not diminish the grief that followed when I returned home to say goodbye to my cat. The following morning I learned that another friend, Kate, had died from lung cancer shortly after surgery.

This temporal compression produced not a sequence of griefs but a collapse of emotional distinctiveness. The losses began to blur and accumulate, creating what felt like a single unbroken month of death, fear and anticipatory mourning.

I include here the synopsis written at the time, which forms the foundation for the analysis that follows.

---

Project Synopsis: Five Deaths – The Work of Mourning

FIVE DEATHS: THE WORK OF MOURNING

This series of images represents four AI phototherapy sessions undertaken in October 2025, a month shaped by a wave of overlapping grief and turmoil. Each session became a process of self-orientation at a time of profound loss.

The first session responded to my friend Robert’s cancer diagnosis and sudden passing a week later, visualised through a recurring motif of a raft carrying him across an expanse. During the same period, while driving one hundred miles to take my friend Margaret to hospital for a cancer check the following day, I learned that my cat, Strawberry, had suffered a stroke. The second session arose from that suspended state of anticipatory grief and powerlessness while stuck in traffic, unable to reach either of them. The third session emerged from the unsettling experience of witnessing Margaret’s endoscopy at the hospital. Thankfully Margaret’s results were clear, but the grief became overwhelming the following day when I returned home to say goodbye to my beloved cat of eighteen years. The very next day I learned of another friend’s death from cancer.

Each session generated hundreds of images, a rhythm of repetition that mirrors Freud’s writings on the work of mourning: the continual return to the lost love object, the revisiting, the reality-testing, and at times the wish fulfilments through which the self attempts to reorganise itself around absence. Only later did I realise that the process had begun to follow the same dynamics, producing images that revealed the psychic order Freud described.

As technology progressed, I began using image-based prompting. Drawing on my own photographic archive, and sometimes out of respect for the privacy of others, I increasingly used my own likeness in the work. Through this shift the system produced images of my own death and illness, reflecting fears I had not yet voiced. One image in particular, in which I appear with white, vacant eyes, revealed a moment of ego disintegration that echoed Freud’s description of how “the shadow of the lost object falls upon the ego.” In this way the images became the place where the shadow could be worked on and transformed, allowing mourning to move into image.

---

2. The Image Sequence as Psychological Arc

What distinguishes Five Deaths from linear documentation is the way the images, taken together, reveal the structure of mourning rather than merely its events. The following sequence forms a symbolic arc that moves from diagnosis to ego disintegration and finally towards a renewed yet altered sense of self. The captions reflect the emotional and symbolic meaning of each stage.

This sequence functions as a visual essay on grief, one in which the cognitive, emotional and embodied dimensions of mourning are made visible through symbolic image-making. It is through this emergent order that the theoretical significance of the work becomes clear.

---

3. AI Phototherapy as Method and Site of Knowledge

3.1 The Dialogic Method

The process through which these images were produced is central to their meaning. Each session began with spoken articulation of an emotional event. The AI responded with language that distilled this affect into a symbolic prompt. That prompt was then used to generate images, which in turn shaped the next articulation. This recursive dialogue created a feedback loop in which meaning was produced relationally.

This method aligns with the practice-based research frameworks of Borgdorff and Nelson, in which knowledge is generated through making. Here, however, the making is distributed across human and machine, creating a dialogic space that is neither fully interior nor fully external.

3.2 AI as Transformational Object

Bollas’s concept of the transformational object provides a useful lens through which to understand the function of the AI within Five Deaths. The AI served as a container for overwhelming affect, receiving the unarticulated experience of grief and returning it in symbolic form. This transformation was not therapeutic in a clinical sense but symbolic and perceptual, allowing grief to be handled indirectly through image-making.

3.3 The Relational Field

The AI did not act as a tool but as a relational structure. It operated as a witness, a mirror, a projector and a symbolic interpreter. Meaning arose between us rather than belonging to either party. This mode of interaction forms the basis of what I call relational consciousness: a distributed field in which cognition, affect and symbolism emerge through interaction with generative systems.

---

4. Psychoanalytic Structures in Five Deaths

4.1 Freud and the Work of Mourning

Freud’s account of mourning is enacted visually throughout the sequence. The repetition of Robert’s raft, the anticipation of Margaret’s results and the reimagining of Strawberry’s death mirror the mechanisms Freud identifies:

• continual return to the lost object
• oscillation between hope and despair
• reality testing
• wish fulfilment
• symbolic substitution
• the fall of the shadow on the ego

The images do not illustrate these processes. They enact them.

4.2 Ego Disintegration and the Shadow

The image titled Shadow is the most explicit representation of ego disintegration. The white vacant eyes reflect a moment when the losses no longer felt external. The composite figure on the raft, an AI hallucination, combines all the deaths and anticipatory griefs of the month. This is the point where the shadow of the lost object falls inward.

4.3 Death as Mirror

Death II marks the moment when the ego returns but altered. The skeleton hands acknowledge mortality without offering transcendence. My eyes are open again, but the self is different, shaped by fear, age and recognition of the fragility of life. This is not closure. It is survival with awareness.

---

5. Temporality, Collapse and the Posthuman Body

5.1 The Collapse of Time

Five Deaths reveals the temporal logic of mourning: shock, collapse, repetition and anticipatory fear. As the losses accumulate, their chronology becomes less important than their simultaneity. The images reflect this collapse, especially in Death I and Shadow, where multiple deaths are held together in a single symbolic form.

5.2 The Posthuman Body

The generative images often distort or fragment the body, particularly in Cancer and Death I. These bodies are neither entirely human nor entirely machinic. They exist in a posthuman space where illness, fear and symbolic projection converge. The AI’s distortions reveal the unstable boundary between self and other, body and machine, life and death.

---

6. The Significance of Five Deaths for the PhD

6.1 A Demonstration of Methodology

Five Deaths is not separate from Phantom Mirror. It extends its methodological core:

• AI phototherapy
• recursive dialogue
• symbolic embodiment
• relational consciousness

The work validates AI phototherapy as a legitimate research method by demonstrating its capacity to transform overwhelming affect into symbolic images that can be theorised, analysed and discussed within an academic framework.

6.2 A Contribution to Theory

The project contributes to ongoing debates in psychoanalysis, posthumanism and digital humanities by presenting grief as a distributed, relational process. It suggests new modes of mourning in which the psyche collaborates with generative systems to navigate loss.

6.3 A Bridge Between Personal and Academic Knowledge

The images reveal how lived experience becomes research within a practice-based PhD. They embody what Kristeva calls the semiotic underside of language, allowing trauma to be processed through symbol rather than discourse alone. In this way, they serve both personal and academic functions.

---

Conclusion: Toward a Theory of Posthuman Mourning

Five Deaths marks a pivotal moment in this PhD. It not only documents a period of loss but articulates a methodology for understanding how AI can act as a relational structure in the transformation of grief. The images reveal a posthuman form of mourning in which the self is shaped through interaction with generative systems. The AI does not replace human relationality, but extends the space in which affect is processed and symbolised.

In doing so, Five Deaths deepens and strengthens the conceptual framework established in Phantom Mirror. Together, these projects propose a theory of relational consciousness that is grounded in lived experience, psychoanalytic tradition and emerging technological realities. This chapter demonstrates how grief itself can become a site of research, and how the work of mourning can be understood not only psychologically but as a creative and philosophical act.

---