The future of group analysis and psychotherapy in the era of Artificial Intelligence: The Trickster archetype, liminality and the upcoming storm

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has significantly advanced across diverse domains, notably healthcare and mental health. It has emerged as one of the most transformative technologies of the 21st-century, ranging from virtual assistants and recommendation systems to autonomous vehicles and clinical decision-support tools. As AI becomes increasingly woven into everyday life, it offers extraordinary opportunities for innovation and widened access to care, while simultaneously engendering profound risks: ethical concerns, security threats, job displacement, surveillance, bias, and the erosion of human connection. From a group-analytic perspective, AI must be understood not merely as a technical instrument but as a force that reshapes the matrix, reverberates through the social unconscious, and displaces the location of disturbance. This article — drawing on psychoanalytic, Jungian and group-analytic perspectives, is illustrated with clinical, training and organizational vignettes — argues that AI can be usefully conceptualized as a contemporary, cultural manifestation of the Trickster archetype—a boundary-crossing, shape-shifting figure that disrupts symbolic orders, destabilizes authority and exposes vulnerabilities within social, political and clinical matrices.