Psychical Objects, Integrative Objects, and the Conceptual Territory Occupied by AI Phototherapy
Purpose of this note
This Fairy Note maps existing academic uses of the concepts psychical object and integrative object in relation to images, media, and digital systems. Its purpose is to establish what conceptual territory is already occupied, and to clarify where the methodology developed in Phantom Mirror and Five Deaths makes a distinct intervention.
This is not a claim to invent new terminology. It is an attempt to stand precisely within existing lineages, and to identify a specific methodological turn that has not yet been fully articulated.
B1. “Psychical object” in relation to digital images, media, and memory
1) Victor Burgin as a key origin point
The concept of the psychical object in relation to images is already well established in the work of Victor Burgin. This matters because it allows the research to situate itself within a recognised theoretical lineage rather than appearing idiosyncratic.
In Burgin’s writing and interviews, the psychical object is not defined by material form. It is defined by effect. Images persist and act within psychic reality regardless of whether they are photographs, films, or digital artefacts. Burgin frequently refers to remembered films, internal image fragments, and recurrent visual scenes as heterogeneous psychical objects that organise fantasy, affect, and desire.
Burgin also links the psychical object to the conditions of digital culture. Digital images, precisely because they are not fixed to a stable material support, intensify psychic investment. They circulate, fragment, and return. Their lack of indexical grounding does not weaken their psychic force. It strengthens it.
What matters for the present research is the orientation of Burgin’s work. He is primarily concerned with existing cultural images that later become psychical objects through memory, repetition, and fantasy. The psychical object, in this account, is something that emerges after the image has entered circulation.
This distinction is foundational. It marks the point at which the current practice begins to diverge.
2) Bollas via screen studies: Catherine Bainbridge
The concept of the psychical object is not confined to Burgin or to visual art theory. It has been taken up rigorously within screen studies, notably by Catherine Bainbridge, who explicitly draws on the psychoanalytic work of Christopher Bollas.
Bainbridge’s analysis of television argues that programmes can function as psychical objects. Viewers do not merely watch them. They use them unconsciously to regulate affect, rehearse fantasy, and process loss. Television becomes a site of psychic transformation rather than passive consumption.
This is important for two reasons. First, it demonstrates that the concept of the psychical object can be applied outside the clinic without losing theoretical precision. Second, it confirms that psychical objects are not limited to fine art or elite cultural forms. They operate within mass media and everyday spectatorship.
However, the direction of causality remains the same as in Burgin. The media object exists first. Psychic investment follows. The psychical object emerges through reception, memory, and internalisation.
The present practice reverses this direction.
3) Digital subjectivity and interface theory: André Nusselder
A further adjacent tradition appears in the work of André Nusselder, who brings Lacanian psychoanalysis into dialogue with computing, interfaces, and cyborg theory. In Interface Fantasy, Nusselder discusses digital objects and psychical objects within the same conceptual field, particularly in relation to fantasy, projection, and identification.
Here, the digital interface is understood as a site that invites psychic investment. Interfaces are not neutral. They structure desire and shape subjectivity. This provides a conceptual bridge between psychoanalysis and contemporary digital systems without collapsing into therapy-app discourse.
Again, however, the emphasis is on how subjects relate to existing systems. The interface is analysed as an object of fantasy and projection. The question is how digital environments shape psychic life.
The present practice is not concerned with analysing interfaces or systems as such. It is concerned with image-making as a psychic act.
4) The central gap: from reception to production
Across these traditions, a clear pattern emerges. The psychical object is most often discussed in relation to:
- remembered images
- cultural artefacts
- spectatorship
- reception
- internalisation after the fact
What is largely absent is any sustained account of the deliberate production of psychical objects as a method.
This is where Phantom Mirror and Five Deaths intervene. The practice is not concerned with how images become psychical objects through circulation and memory. It is concerned with how psychical objects can be produced intentionally, under conditions of affective pressure, using a repeatable and documented method.
The images are not recalled. They are seized. They are produced at moments when symbolic organisation is under strain. This shift from reception to production marks the first clear site of originality.
B2. “Integrative object” and generic epistemology (Anne-Françoise Schmid)
1) Integrative objects in HCI
A second conceptual problem concerns disciplinary placement. The difficulty of situating AI phototherapy within any single academic field is not accidental. It reflects the nature of the object itself.
This difficulty is now being acknowledged explicitly within Human–Computer Interaction. A 2023 CHI paper introduces the concept of the integrative object, drawing on the work of Anne-Françoise Schmid and her theory of generic epistemology.
The argument made in that paper is that certain contemporary sociotechnical phenomena cannot be adequately addressed by importing existing disciplinary methods. Instead, the object itself must dictate the epistemological arrangement. Knowledge must be organised around the object’s requirements rather than around disciplinary norms.
The appearance of integrative objects within HCI is itself telling. It signals epistemic strain within a field traditionally oriented towards design, optimisation, and intervention.
2) Integrative objects in aesthetics and practice research
Outside HCI, the concept of the integrative object has also been taken up within aesthetics and practice research. In these contexts, the integrative object is allowed to remain heterogeneous, unstable, and unresolved.
Examples include work that links integrative objects to aesthetics and epistemology, and practice-based research that treats media forms such as comics as integrative objects whose epistemic space must accommodate contradiction and heterogeneity.
This usage is closer to the situation of AI phototherapy. The object is not awaiting stabilisation. Its instability is constitutive.
3) What Schmid gives this research
Schmid’s concept is valuable not as a label, but as a structural explanation. It allows the research to argue that:
- AI phototherapy is not simply art using AI
- it cannot be stabilised by art history alone
- it cannot be stabilised by psychoanalysis alone
- it cannot be stabilised by HCI, dementia studies, or media theory
Each of these disciplines illuminates part of the object, but none can contain it.
In this sense, AI phototherapy itself becomes an integrative object. The PhD is not merely an analysis of that object. It is the construction of a method adequate to it. This provides a robust rationale for why the research must be practice-led and interdisciplinary at doctoral level.
What this means for originality
This mapping allows a precise formulation of originality without inflation.
What is not original
- The concept of the psychical object as developed by Victor Burgin and extended through Bollas-influenced media studies
- The existence of integrative objects as a way of framing interdisciplinary problems, including in digital contexts
What is original
- A documented, repeatable method for producing psychical objects in real time through AI image-making under conditions of affective pressure, rather than analysing existing media objects retrospectively.
- A distinct temporal model in which symbolic production occurs immediately, while meaning is deferred and emerges later through review and sequencing. This aligns with the Spence–Martin phototherapy lineage but is transformed by the speed of generative AI.
- A reframing of AI phototherapy itself as an integrative object, and of the PhD as the attempt to build an epistemic scaffold adequate to that object.
Closing note
This Fairy Note establishes the conceptual ground upon which the research stands. It clarifies that the work does not float outside existing theory, but it also does not fit comfortably within any single tradition. That discomfort is not a weakness. It is diagnostic of the object being studied.
This note therefore functions as an orientation tool. It explains why the work looks the way it does, why it resists certain framings, and why it demands a practice-led, interdisciplinary approach.
Bibliography
Psychoanalysis, Mourning, and Psychical Objects
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Victor Burgin, Psychical Realism, and Digital Images
Burgin, V. (2004). A Place to Read. London: Reaktion Books.
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Burgin, V. (2009). ‘Towards a Psychical Realism’. New Formations, 66, pp. 7–23.
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Screen Studies and Media as Psychical Objects
Bainbridge, C. (2014). A Feminine Cinematics: Women, Psychoanalysis, and the British Film Industry. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bainbridge, C. (2019). ‘Television as Psychical Object: Mad Men and the Value of Psychoanalysis’. Television & New Media, 20(6), pp. 561–575.
Digital Subjectivity, Interfaces, and Psychoanalysis
Nusselder, A. (2009). Interface Fantasy: A Lacanian Cyborg Ontology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Walter Benjamin, Memory, and the Image
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Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Memory
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Casey, E. S. (2000). Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Integrative Objects and Generic Epistemology
Schmid, A.-F. (2011). Generic Epistemology. London: University of Westminster Press.
Schmid, A.-F. and Mambrini-Doudet, D. (2019). ‘Integrative Objects and Generic Method’. Foundations of Science, 24, pp. 1–20.
Integrative Objects in HCI and Sociotechnical Research
Bødker, S. et al. (2023). ‘Integrative Objects in Sociotechnical Contexts’. Proceedings of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM.
Practice Research and Artistic Epistemology
Borgdorff, H. (2012). The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia. Leiden: Leiden University Press.
Nelson, R. (2013). Practice as Research in the Arts. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Phototherapy and Feminist Practice Lineage
Spence, J. (1986). Putting Myself in the Picture. London: Camden Press.
Martin, R. (2009). ‘Rewriting Phototherapy’. In The Family in Crisis. London: Routledge.
Dementia, Illness, and Lived Experience
Kontos, P. (2004). ‘Ethnographic Reflections on Selfhood, Embodiment and Alzheimer’s Disease’. Ageing & Society, 24(6), pp. 829–849.
Carel, H. (2016). Phenomenology of Illness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Posthumanism and AI
Hayles, N. K. (1999). How We Became Posthuman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Optional Extensions
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Simondon, G. (2017). On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.