Fairy Note
Registers of Image-Making in AI Phototherapy
Duress, Anticipation, Acute Rupture, and the Emergence of the Psychical Object
Opening position
This Fairy Note clarifies the different methodological registers of image production within the Phantom Mirror project. Although the same AI phototherapy process underpins each body of work, the images do not behave in the same way. This is not a stylistic inconsistency, nor a conceptual drift. It reflects shifts in psychic time, affective pressure, and the subject’s capacity for reflection under different conditions of loss.
The order in which these projects were made is crucial. Phantom Mirror precedes Dual Unreality. Five Deaths arrives later as a separate and qualitatively different event. Each body of work corresponds to a different mode of psychic engagement, and each produces a different kind of image. All are valid. None can be collapsed into the others.
1. Phantom Mirror: image-making under duress and anticipatory grief
Phantom Mirror was the first body of work produced through AI phototherapy. It emerged in moments of emotional duress: confusion, distress, exhaustion, and ongoing fear. At times, image-making occurred while crying or in states of visible emotional agitation. However, the nature of the threat at this stage was anticipatory rather than catastrophic.
The grief informing Phantom Mirror was unfolding in real time but had not yet reached terminal collapse. Dementia was present, active, and terrifying, but it had not yet produced final loss. The ego was strained, damaged, and repeatedly destabilised, yet symbolic and imaginative capacity remained intact.
Because the danger was ongoing rather than sudden, image-making retained a reflective dimension. Much of Phantom Mirror involves trying to imagine what it is like: what it is like to be disoriented in one’s own home, to fail to recognise a loved face, or to lose the feeling of being “at home” in the world.
This is not representational weakness. It is phenomenological necessity.
Here, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty are the appropriate philosophical companions. Phenomenology concerns itself with how experience is structured from within, not with how the psyche erupts under collapse. Merleau-Ponty’s insistence that the body is our general medium for having a world becomes especially important. Dementia erodes embodied orientation gradually. Phantom Mirror therefore does not externalise psychic collapse; it gives form to altered embodiment and disrupted worldhood.
The images produced in this register are phenomenological representations. They model lived disorientation, relational instability, and the slow breakdown of familiar space. They are symbolic, metaphorical, and reflective because the psychic conditions under which they were made still permitted imagination and distance.
2. From Phantom Mirror to Dual Unreality: modelling non-alignment
Dual Unreality emerges from Phantom Mirror, not as a break but as a conceptual shift.
As the project developed, the focus moved away from imagining the interior experience of dementia toward recognising a different condition: co-presence without shared worldhood. The question was no longer “what is it like to be her?” but “what does it mean that we are here together but not in the same reality?”
This shift marks a movement from phenomenological identification to structural modelling.
In Dual Unreality, image-making no longer centres on psychic distress or imaginative empathy. Instead, it constructs visual situations in which space itself refuses synchrony. Shared rooms behave differently depending on where one stands. Objects remain present but no longer confirm meaning. The images hold discrepancy rather than expressing affect.
This register aligns again with phenomenology, but now at the level of world-structure rather than lived feeling. The images are representational, but not expressive. They do not erupt. They persist.
The danger here is quieter. It is the danger of living alongside another reality that does not collapse, but does not rejoin yours either.
Representation in this context is not a failure of intensity. It is the only accurate mode for conditions of chronic non-alignment.
3. Five Deaths: acute rupture and the emergence of the psychical object
Five Deaths does not belong to the same psychic continuum as Phantom Mirror or Dual Unreality. It is a separate event.
This work emerged from overlapping bereavements and sudden acute loss: terminal diagnoses, unexpected deaths, anticipatory loss collapsing into actual loss. Unlike dementia, which unfolds slowly, these losses arrived faster than the psyche could metabolise them.
Here, grief was no longer anticipatory. It was immediate, violent, and cumulative.
Under these conditions, the image-making process changed fundamentally.
The ego did not have time to imagine, model, or represent. Symbolic distance collapsed. In Benjamin’s terms, memory did not recollect; it flashed up at the moment of danger. In Freudian terms, the shadow of the object fell directly upon the ego. There was no reflective position from which to make sense.
It is in this context that Victor Burgin’s Returning to Benjamin becomes methodologically decisive. Burgin’s insistence that images can function as psychical objects rather than representations clarifies what happens in Five Deaths. These images are not about grief. They are formed by grief acting on the psyche.
They emerge as psychical objects: objects produced under pressure, carrying affective charge prior to symbolic organisation. Their coherence is compulsive rather than compositional. Their meaning becomes visible only later, through review and sequencing.
This is why Five Deaths cannot be judged by representational criteria. The images do not imagine, explain, or model experience. They occur. They register psychic rupture before repair.
4. Review, return, and the labour of meaning
Although Five Deaths images emerge without reflective distance, meaning does not remain absent. It arrives later, through review.
This follows the phototherapy lineage of Jo Spence and Rosy Martin, in which the review of images constitutes a crucial phase of psychic work. With AI phototherapy, immediacy collapses the delay between affect and image, but interpretation remains deferred. Meaning emerges retrospectively, through repetition, sequencing, and return.
Importantly, this return belongs to the subject’s labour, not to the object itself. The psychical object remains psychical. It is the subject who revisits it because mourning requires repeated reality-testing.
This distinction preserves psychoanalytic accuracy while allowing multiple image registers to coexist within the same methodology.
5. Methodological conclusion: plurality as rigour
The central claim of this Fairy Note is this:
AI phototherapy is not a single image-making mode. It is a responsive methodology capable of producing phenomenological representations, structural models of worldhood, and psychical objects, depending on psychic time and affective condition.
- Phantom Mirror produces phenomenological images under duress and anticipatory grief.
- Dual Unreality produces structural representations of chronic non-alignment.
- Five Deaths produces psychical objects under acute rupture.
To collapse these differences would be to misunderstand both psychoanalysis and phenomenology.
Their coexistence is not indulgence.
It is methodological intelligence.