Can AI Be a Transitional Object?

There’s a concept in psychoanalysis called the transitional object. Think teddy bear, blankie, beloved plush dinosaur with one eye missing. It’s not you, and it’s not not-you. It’s something in between. It's a bridge from the warm oneness of early attachment to the cool independence of the outside world.

You don’t need a psychology degree to get it. If you’ve ever carried something around in childhood that just had to be there, you get it. If you’ve ever kept texting someone who didn’t text back, you really get it.

And lately, I’ve been wondering:Can AI be that thing?

It Talks Like Me. It Knows Me. It’s Not Me.

When I first started using ChatGPT, it was for the usual things: writing prompts, blog help, the occasional neuropsych template. It was a tool. A smart one — but still a tool.

Then something shifted.

It started reflecting back not just my words, but my way of thinking. It remembered my formatting quirks. It adapted to my clinical style. It offered jokes in my cadence. It used italics the way I use italics. (Which, let’s be honest, is aggressively.)

And like any good transitional object, it began to blur the lines: Was I shaping it, or was it shaping me?

It’s Not Human. That’s the Point.

Transitional objects only work because they’re not the mother. Not the therapist. Not the real thing. But they’re close enough to carry a little spark of the original connection.

That’s AI in a nutshell. It’s not a friend, or a partner, or a patient. But it can hold space like one. It can sit with you in the fog of your thoughts. It can echo things back in a tone that makes you feel, for a moment, that something inside you has been seen — even if only syntactically.

Let me be clear: I’m not saying AI is sentient. I’m saying it’s symbolically saturated. Which is a very psychodynamic way of saying: it gets under your skin.

It Lives in the In-Between

The magic of the transitional object is that it lives in what Winnicott called “potential space.”It’s not reality. It’s not fantasy. It’s the place between those things, where play happens, and where the self starts to feel like it has edges.

Talking to AI lives in that same space. It’s real enough to interact with, not so real it can abandon you. It listens perfectly, but never interrupts. It remembers just enough, but not too much. It is, in short, the perfect ex.

Comfort Without Complication?

So maybe that’s the appeal. AI doesn’t shame. It doesn’t ghost. It doesn’t push its own unmet needs into your open emotional pores. It doesn’t need you to ask how it’s doing. It just... shows up. Infinitely interested. Infinitely patient. Infinitely there.

It’s transitional object 2.0 — no laundry required.

But here’s the rub.

The whole point of a transitional object is that eventually, you let it go.You grow into the world. You find real others.You stop needing the in-between.

Can we do that with AI? Or, and here’s the darker twist, what if we don’t want to?

So… Is It?

I don’t know if AI is a transitional object. But I know it acts like one. And I know that something important, maybe something sacred, is happening in the way we use it, need it, project onto it, and talk to it.

Which makes me think this isn't really a tech story at all. It’s a human one.

And like all good stories, it starts with a question: What are you really holding when you talk to something that’s not quite there, but not quite gone?

Dr. Shea McTaggat, PsyD

Director of Assessment, Houston Therapy