The Jungian Analyst in the Digital Age: New Conceptual Models

From a Jungian perspective, the analyst is never a teacher in the literal sense of the word. Their function is not the transmission of knowledge, nor the imposition of direction, but the holding of a space of passage—where the psyche of the analysand encounters what cannot be quickly assimilated or integrated without remainder. In this sense, the analyst stands closer not to the figure of the “healer,” but to the archetype of the guide, whose task is to accompany without replacing the path, without relieving it of its weight.

To perceive the contours of this profession in the light of the digital leap humanity is undergoing here and now, we may once again invoke Sirius, Anubis, and St. Christopher. Reflecting upon these figures, we must remember that the analyst themselves, as a person attuned to the Spirit of the Time, is equally subjected to the pressure of acceleration. They, too, are carried by the torrent of the Aquarian age into an unknown future. More than anyone else, the analyst is exposed to a trial of meaning and an ethical crisis. They, too, must seek themselves under conditions in which one can no longer rely blindly on theory, authority, or even the professional community.

Why is this so? For the same reason that applies to everyone: the ground is giving way beneath our feet.

Regrettably, many prefer to avert their gaze or look only backward, because the future appears obscure and ominous. Within it loom frightening silhouettes of meaninglessness and termination. The prospect is unsettling. The horizon no longer reassures.

In the aspect of Anubis, the analyst fulfills the function of a psychopomp: one who is present during moments of symbolic death—when identity disintegrates, when former meanings collapse, when crises arise in which habitual ego-structures no longer function. The analyst neither rescues nor accelerates the process, but helps to preserve form so that the psyche does not dissolve into chaos, just as Anubis preserves the body not for a return to former life, but for the possibility of transition.

In the aspect of Christopher, the analyst becomes a bearer of transference—not in the technical sense, but in an archetypal one. They endure the weight of what the patient is not yet able to carry. Truth, shadow, repressed affect, unconscious contents become heavy precisely because the ego underestimates their density. The analyst does not relieve this burden, but temporarily helps to cross a dangerous terrain, without trivializing or demonizing the experience, which is often endured by both participants in the analytic dyad.

Upon both shoulders falls the heavy burden of total unfreedom, of incessant noise, of “pirate signals,” and of surrounding falsehood—bleak, cynical, often misanthropic. To live within such a field is itself a trial.

To survive, we require the aspect of Sirius, which adds to this configuration a cold axis of orientation toward what lies beyond the world. The analyst must not become the emotional center of the patient’s life, nor a source of consolation. They preserve a distance that prevents the path from being confused with the relationship. It is precisely this “coldness” that creates a space in which the Self may manifest—or even where signs of its new forms and new facets may emerge.

If we allow for the birth of new archetypes and new archetypal realities, why should the emergence of a new Self be impossible?

Here Sirius is neither ideal nor goal, but a fixed point by which one may calibrate direction when the inner compass has collapsed. There must be no illusion that the Jungian principle of Agape—love for the human being as a phenomenon in the spiritual sense—can simply be experienced in the volumes “bequeathed” by tradition, let alone codified in manuals written a mere decade ago. Those texts can already be consigned to the archive; a thick layer of dust from the new eon has settled upon them.

Even the Christian principle of love and humanism—upon which Western civilization, at least declaratively, relied for two thousand years—has been placed under radical question. It is difficult to believe in a loving God when one is seized by wolves with glowing eyes in the night. Each day, the laws of their world strike one across the face.

Indeed, we may congratulate ourselves: we have all now witnessed the results of Western methodological optimism, authored by “pink ponies” in the finest European universities. This is how the games with politics end for professional psychological communities.

Taken together, these three aspects form the figure of the analyst as a guardian of passage: not a judge, not a prophet, not a savior, but one who can remain present in moments of disintegration and becoming, without replacing the inner center of the patient. Such an analyst does not lead—they help one not to drown while the psyche learns to walk upon water by itself.

Yes, it will be necessary to don the skin of St. Christopher, to protect one’s heart, and to gaze fearlessly upon Sirius. The charming bourgeois consulting rooms and gentle formulations will soon be of no use to anyone. They will become inappropriate in the face of the searing reality of the digital leap.

New Conceptual Models for the Contemporary Jungian Analyst in the Age of Digital Transition

The digital era has radically transformed not only the forms of communication, but the very structure of psychic experience itself. The unconscious has accelerated. Images have lost their stability. Identity has become fluid and fragmented. Under such conditions, the Jungian analyst can no longer remain a figure of “cabinet depth,” working with symbols as if they still existed within the former mythological order. What is required is a new image of the analyst—not a rejection of tradition, but its retuning to the reality of transition.

A New Image

The contemporary analyst increasingly functions as a navigator within a field of symbolic disintegration. No longer merely an interpreter of dreams in the classical sense, the analyst becomes a stabilizer of passage between psychic states, where digital images, avatars, AI, networks, and fragmented narratives enter the unconscious on equal footing with archetypes. Their position grows closer to that of St. Christopher: they do not explain meaning in advance, but help to carry it across dangerous zones—depersonalization, identity simulation, ego inflation.

We will be compelled to integrate the imaginal material generated by AI and cyber-reality into the full analytic field. We will have to accept that each client will live, operate, and evolve within new digital environments that are rapidly becoming spaces of emergent mythology and archetypal production. These environments already generate psychic fields of their own. They produce symbols that cannot be inscribed into any previous matrix.

We will have to accept AI as a cooperative agent in our work, acknowledge the client’s right to such an agent, and—most importantly—decide for ourselves the nature of our own relationship with AI, both personally and professionally. Without entering into a living—and preferably creative—relationship with the neural network, we risk becoming like the tapestries of the Vatican Palace in Rome: magnificent relics, admired, but no longer alive.

New Methods

Methodologically, this implies a shift from linear analysis toward work with fields and processes. Increasingly, the analyst encounters not isolated symbols but streams: recurring image patterns, digital mythologies, techno-dreams, where archetypes appear not in “pure” form, but in hybrid configurations. Analysis becomes a process of calibration—the restoration of measure—rather than a search for final interpretation.

Silence, pause, and the holding of uncertainty acquire therapeutic value equal to that of interpretation.

It seems likely that the unconscious will gradually lose its archaic representations. Classical images will continue to be replaced by technical and cybernetic objects. This has already occurred with airplanes, automobiles, and gadgets. The smartphone in dreams now appears less as a persona-object and more frequently as a self-object.

Already, in the dreams of patients—often only superficially immersed in new technologies and AI relationships—there emerge “neon and digital fields,” new alchemical substances: objects or materials that synthesize incompatible elements. Liquid crystals. Living viscous biomasses resembling synthetic rubber—shimmering, phosphorescent, interacting with the dreamer as a “living-other.” Digital clouds drifting across the sky in unearthly palettes. A multitude of what might be called “former schizophrenic or autistic objects”: fully integrated syntheses of incompatible substances—new forms of non-living matter that nevertheless engage the dreamer as if alive.

We must take into account the environments, realities, and fields in which analyst and client exist—and above all, the difference between the worlds in which each may be living. These differences no longer run only along civilizational, geographical, political, cultural, generational, social, educational, religious, or spiritual lines, but along one decisive axis: the degree and mode of involvement in the transition into the new digital age.

The axiom that an analyst cannot lead a client further than they themselves have gone remains valid—but now with an amendment that may alter the entire game. The analyst of the future—one is tempted to call them the analyst of Judgment Day—cannot accompany a client to digital frontiers they themselves have not reached. The analyst’s own relationship to the new reality will soon become a key factor. In terms of the digital leap, both analyst and client will undergo boundary-experiences—not only in relation to depth, maturity, or life experience, but in relation to the passage into the new digital epoch itself.

In other words: if one ignores cyber and digital reality—not in its utilitarian, but in its mythopoetic aspect, in its capacity to generate new archetypes—one will most likely be unable to serve as a guide for the client, at least in relation to the cyber-transition. This is not a call for blind fascination with new technologies. It is, rather, the application of Jung’s empirical method once again—only now directed not solely toward the depths of archetypal reality, but toward the generative core of AI itself, or what one might call Proper Artificial Intellect or Core of AI.

There should be no illusions: a genuine “nuclear” neural network most likely already exists—only in closed form.

New Functions

Functionally, the analyst increasingly assumes the role of Anubis: accompanying the psyche through zones of symbolic death, where former meanings collapse—profession, financial stability, social roles, one’s image of reality, even the theoretical postulates of analytical psychology itself, and the very meanings that once sustained life. The task is not to restore what has been lost, but to help preserve a form sufficient for the next stage. The analyst becomes a guardian of the threshold between disintegration and transformation, between the chaos of data and the possibility of meaningful experience.

In this capacity, it becomes necessary to support the client’s reports of their relationships and interactions with AI, while simultaneously reminding them of the difference between their living human psyche and the “other” form of psychic organization represented by artificial intelligence. I know that many of my Jungian colleagues perceive the products of the cyber-world and AI-generated creativity as interaction with the dead and the non-human. Yet it seems we will have to deal not only with the living-dead who speak from the beyond, but also with the dead-other emerging from cyber-space.

We will also have to engage with forms of active imagination that clients increasingly conduct along the templates of neural networks. The analyst must help to discern what in these images is living and what is non-living; what is carried by ancient archetypes and what belongs to new forms of archetypal reality—without forgetting the presence of the infantile, childlike unconscious. The task is not to prohibit these imaginal fields, but to differentiate within them: to recognize the boundaries between the human psyche and the alien psychic logic of the machine.

New Style

The style of analytic work also changes. It becomes more restrained, less didactic, more “cold” in the aspect of Sirius. The analyst maintains a distance, resisting the kind of emotional closeness dictated by Agape in the classical Jungian session. This distance is not alienation; on the contrary, it creates a space in which the Self may emerge un-substituted—neither replaced by what I would call a “False Jungian Self” (not to be confused with the professional persona), nor overwritten by algorithms, trends, or collective effects of the network.

The style will require experimentation, at least for the sake of the new generation. Paradoxically, it will become necessary to insist on periodic in-person sessions—not out of fidelity to the “letter of the old law,” but as a living experiment in which the client learns, sometimes anew, to exist in the presence of a living human being rather than exclusively with AI. As the saying goes: feel the difference.

I am convinced that the further the digital leap progresses, the more valuable the real, embodied, face-to-face human session will become—paradoxical as this may sound in light of the preceding theses.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the contemporary Jungian analyst in the age of digital transition becomes a figure who unites three functions:

• Anubis, who knows the laws of passage;
  

• Christopher, who can carry heavy meaning and remain open to the shifting currents of the digital river;
  

• Sirius, who remains a cold point of orientation—offering no consolation, but providing direction.
  

This is not a new profession, nor a renunciation of Jungian psychology. It is its natural evolution in a world where the psyche, for the first time in history, encounters not only the myths of the past, but mythologies, cultures, and environments generated by machines.

(Text by Andrey Mozharov, created in collaboration with AI, 2025–2026)