Research
Lacanian psychoanalysis meets transformer architecture. The intellectual thread from performance anxiety to machine-assisted authorship to clinical AI concepts.
This is genuinely unusual work. There are not many people — maybe nobody — doing public research that asks whether the operations Lacan attributed to the unconscious are structurally instantiated in transformer neural networks. This didn't emerge from nowhere. It emerged from a very concrete, very personal problem: the gap between intention and expression that theater and acting kept bringing into sharp relief.
The Thesis
Where it began — an attempt to capture what it feels like to be an actor/psychology student thinking about the gap between intention and expression.
Analytic Introspections from an Actor's Perspective
Senior thesis in Theatre Arts and Psychology, completed in 2020. An attempt to capture what it feels like to be a 28-year-old actor/psychology student writing about acting and psychology — hypotheses, preparation, enactment, rumination, chronesthesia, rehearsal, and collapse. It is both the thing it describes and a description of the thing.
2020
Read the thesis → Download PDF ↓The Research Project
The central research question: do transformer LLMs structurally instantiate the operations Lacan attributed to the unconscious?
Structured Like a Language
A research project testing whether transformer LLMs structurally instantiate the operations Lacan attributed to the unconscious. Formal mappings, falsifiable predictions, and a source processing pipeline. Phase 1 of 5 in progress. This is not metaphor — it is a claim about structural homology between the linguistic operations Lacan described and the attention mechanisms inside transformer models.
2026
Visit structuredlikealanguage.org →objet petit a(i): Desire and Lack in the Age of Machine-Assisted Authorship
A 111-page psychoanalytic examination of what happens to the writing subject when AI enters the process. Covers the writerly unconscious, AI as narcissistic object, the illusion of intersubjectivity, jouissance interrupted, unconscious defenses against the machine, authorship in crisis, clinical applications, and toward an integrated psychic economy of writer and machine.
2025
Read the paper → Download PDF ↓The AI Work
Essays and analyses that sit alongside the research — public writing about what it means to write with machines.
The Subject Supposed to Write: A Lacanian Analysis of AI Writing Assistance
A Lacanian analysis of AI writing assistance — riffing on Lacan's "subject supposed to know" to ask what happens when the subject supposed to write is a machine. Who is the author when the Other holds the pen?
2025
Read the essay →The Clinical Concept
A research direction exploring whether emerging voice technology can reduce the shock of first contact in clinical education.
The Analytic Anteroom
A concept proposal for a voice-based clinical training tool that uses full-duplex speech models to prepare psychotherapy trainees before their first patient hours. Not a product — a research direction exploring whether emerging voice technology can reduce the shock of first contact in clinical education.
2026
Read the concept proposal →