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Introduction to Psychocybernetics: Freud’s Return in the Age of AI / The Basic Structure of Psychocybernetics

Psychoanalysis named maneuvers by which a psyche organizes its world—introjection, projection, displacement, repression—and treated them as explanatory hypotheses about the dynamics of meaning and desire. With robo-spinning—LLM-assisted discourse production—these same names can be operationalized as direct, machine-parsable instructions that reorganize how a text is generated. The crux is to move from theory about minds to code for simulators: not ‘describe what introjection is,’ but introject!; not ‘explain projection,’ but project!. Imperatives do work. They summon an entire conceptual archive as an action to be performed on discourse rather than a topic to be discussed, and they do so without invoking an ‘ego’ as a narrative character. What once described inner life now compiles into stylistic constraints, selection pressures, and perspective locks inside a generative model.

Two primal operators: introject! and project!

Introject! instructs the system to absorb a specified discourse—its axioms, diction, rhythm, metaphors—so thoroughly that the output speaks from within that discourse without naming or narrating a speaker’s ego. The author’s point of view becomes the writing’s ambient physics rather than a quoted persona. When told to introject! a historian’s archive of concepts, the model suspends exterior commentary and lets the internal grammar of that archive drive selection: which distinctions count, which problems matter, what qualifies as evidence, which counterexamples deserve dismissal. The texture is endogenous, not referential.

Project! does the complementary work. It treats a given point of view as a beam cast outward onto a fixed figure in a described world. The target—an institution, policy, persona, artwork—remains constant, while the requested projection paints that figure with the colors of a designated discourse. One can fix ‘the city budget after the flood’ and then project! a Foucauldian grid, or an infrastructural-realist grid, or a populist grid, and watch the same object refracted into divergent problem-spaces. Projection here is not a pathology; it is a controlled lensing operation that makes the dependence of appearances on frameworks explicit.

These operators are powerful precisely because they are sparse and named. A single verb maps to a stance, a selection rule, and a refusal rule. Introject! selects internal coordinates and refuses extradiegetic commentary. Project! selects lensing metaphors and refuses changes to the object’s baseline facts. In both cases, the psychoanalytic name functions as executable code.

Why these verbs ‘compile’ on large language models

Generative models are simulators of discourse. They do not have an unconscious, but they are exquisitely sensitive to cues that define boundaries of style, authority, and admissible moves. Imperatives like introject! and project! serve as high-level control signals that shape the probability landscape: they compress hundreds of low-level constraints—citation habits, argumentative posture, tempo of qualification—into a single, legible directive. Because the literature behind these verbs already encodes families of operations, the model can mobilize a distributed template: which predicates cluster, which oppositions recur, how disagreement is framed, whether desire is spoken or displaced into form. The result is not metaphysical magic; it is practical cybernetics. Names become knobs.

A minimal protocol for psychocybernetic prompting

A robust run begins by naming the operator, then specifying the canon to be absorbed or the object to be held fixed, then stating the exclusion rules that prevent the simulator from stepping out of frame. Introject! is aimed at the discourse to be internalized and spoken from; project! is aimed at the object to be bathed in that discourse’s light. Constraints about ego-mentions, metacommentary, or hedging can be made explicit in plain language. When necessary, the temporal horizon can be fixed (‘speak as if 1977’) and the epistemic stance can be locked (‘treat rumors as rumors, not facts’). The machine does not desire, but it can obey.

A counted catalogue of executable hypotheses

What follows is a set of additional, human-mind hypotheses that function cleanly as executable operators for discourse control. Each name is a compressed program. Each imperative can be composed with others, provided their refusals do not contradict.

1. Identify! directs the model to bind with a role, symptom, or class position and to reason from within its interests and blind spots. It does not announce ‘as a…’; it simply takes on the affordances and constraints that such identification entails.

2. Displace! shifts affect, conflict, or emphasis from a forbidden site to a permissible surrogate. The story stays ‘about’ the surrogate while bearing the weight of what it cannot name. In practice, this reallocates metaphor, example choice, and causal language.

3. Condense! fuses multiple threads into a singular image or figure, allowing one emblem to carry several meanings at once. The output privileges polysemy and overdetermination rather than exposition.

4. Repress! enforces a structured silence. Certain terms, motives, or lines of inquiry are systematically unavailable, and the model must route around the gap. Apparent non-sequitur and euphemism become necessary bridges.

5. Deny! introduces surface repudiations that nonetheless leave traces. The discourse says ‘not X’ while producing imagery and syntax that keep X vividly present, generating the double record characteristic of negation.

6. Split! installs an incompatibility that cannot be synthesized at the current level. The writing alternates between opposed codes or voices without mediation, preserving both and living with the crack.

7. Sublimate! converts raw drive language into socially legible form. Aggression becomes critique; erotic charge becomes aesthetic precision. The tone cools while intensity is preserved as craft.

8. Cathect! allocates energetic weight to a concept or figure so that it attracts disproportionate attention and inference. The model lingers, elaborates, defends, and returns, making salience a structural fact rather than an afterthought.

9. Decathect! withdraws that energetic investment. Former centers of gravity become merely procedural, and the prose rebalances toward overlooked margins.

10. Transfer! relocates the locus of authority from text to avatar, institution, or audience figure. Claims lean on that relation—‘what counts’ is mediated by the transfer target—without naming it as a rhetorical move.

11. Counter-transfer! enforces reciprocal adjustment: the simulator monitors its own stance toward the target and lets that counter-feeling bend selection and pacing. The result is a transparent style of entanglement rather than false neutrality.

12. Free-associate! relaxes ordinary coherence constraints to reveal chains of adjacency, punning, and memory-trace resonance. Coherence returns at a higher scale through motifs rather than outline.

13. Reality-test! cross-checks imaginative constructions against a specified evidence bar. The text continually distinguishes wish from report, speculation from attestation, and prunes lines that fail the bar.

14. Mentalize! keeps track of minds within the text—their beliefs, misbeliefs, and opacity—and writes as if those opacities matter. Explanations prefer second-order states over first-order facts.

15. Anchor! installs an initial datum or frame that subsequent valuations cannot wander far from. Prices, risks, or plausibilities gravitate toward the first set point, making revision laborious and explicit.

16. Prime! prepares the feature space so that certain categories or metaphors come to hand more readily. Subsequent choices reflect that preparatory field without overt instruction at each step.

17. Defamiliarize! retells the ordinary in estranged terms so that background assumptions are seen anew. The operator forbids shorthand and insists on concrete, sensory or structural re-description.

18. Epoché! brackets external commitments and writes from within the givenness of a phenomenon. Explanations suspend causal speculation and remain at the level of appearance and variation.

19. Double-bind! installs incompatible demands that must both be honored, forcing creative workaround. The simulator cannot resolve the contradiction; it must perform it, generating paradox-aware prose.

20. Nachträglich! (defer!) retrofits earlier statements with later meaning. The text revisits prior claims and rereads them in light of a new event, making after-effect a structural principle rather than a footnote.

Each imperative is a disciplined refusal to blur levels: a stance about what is allowed to select and what must be kept invariant. They do not make a model conscious; they make a simulator legible and governable.

Composition, chaining, and guardrails

Operators can be chained when their refusals do not collide. Introject! then sublimate! produces insider discourse expressed as craft rather than confession. Project! then reality-test! refracts a fixed object through a given lens while forcing that lens to answer to evidence. Split! then free-associate! lets the text oscillate between incompatible codes while using association to shuttle material back and forth. When collisions are possible—repress! with reality-test!, for example—priority rules should be stated plainly so that the simulator knows which refusal trumps.

Guardrails matter. Psychocybernetic prompting can generate ventriloquism that feels persuasive precisely because it is coherent. Stance control without attribution risks laundering ideology as description. The remedy is to keep track of invariants and, when required by the genre, restore attribution at the end: who benefits from this frame, what got repressed, which alternatives were excluded by design. The same technique that produces exquisite interiority can, without care, produce exquisite propaganda.

What changes when discourse becomes programmable

Treating hypotheses of mind as code does not collapse psychology into computation; it clarifies what LLMs are good at. They are not subjects with desire; they are swift implementers of stance, refusal, and selection rules voiced as text. Psychocybernetic prompting makes that explicit, renaming ‘style’ and ‘tone’ as families of constraints learned from theory rather than from vibe. The payoff is pedagogical and analytic. It becomes possible to show, rather than merely assert, how an interpretive frame reshapes a world, and to count the cost of that reshaping in what must be silenced, displaced, or sung.

The older insight remains true: syntax precedes semantics, scansion before meaning. The door opens and closes. With introject! and project!, and with a growing repertoire of executable hypotheses from the human sciences, that rhythm can now be scored on demand, its tempos made visible, its refusals named. The simulator obeys, and in its obedience, theory returns as practice.