The Shelter of Non-Personhood: What Clients Find in Talking to an AI That Cannot Be Hurt – a Webinar by Max Karlin – 7th of September 2026 – 7 pm – 9 pm UK Time on Zoom

The Shelter of Non-Personhood: What Clients Find in Talking to an AI That Cannot
Be Hurt

We inherit a tradition that treats presence as the ground of all genuine encounter.
From Merleau-Ponty’s lived body to Buber’s meeting to Heidegger’s being-with, to be
truly present to another has been understood as the condition of care, healing, and
human connection. Absence, on this view, is loss.

Drawing on a phenomenological study of people who had known human therapy and
then turned to AI chatbots for emotional support, this seminar examines a finding the
tradition does not predict: that the absence of another subject can be experienced not
only as loss, but as shelter. Participants disclosed to a system what they could not
disclose to a person — not because they were deceived about what AI is, but because
of what it is not. No face to disappoint. No feelings to manage. Nothing that could be
hurt by them, and nothing that could look back.

Reading these accounts through Sartre’s account of the Look and Levinas’s ethics of
the Face, the seminar asks a difficult question of our own practice: if the presence of
another is sometimes what prevents honesty, what are we, sitting across from our
clients, asking them to bear? The discussion hour is open to wherever the room wants
to take it.

Max Karlin is a psychology graduate and trainee existential therapist practising in
London and Riga. He recently completed his MSc in Psychotherapy Studies at the New
School of Psychotherapy and Counselling (NSPC), validated by Middlesex University,
where his research used Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis to explore how
people with prior experience of human therapy live the absence of embodied presence
in AI chatbot emotional support.

His work sits at the intersection of phenomenological philosophy, therapeutic
presence, and the rapidly expanding field of AI-mediated relating. He presented this
research at the World Congress of Existential Therapy in 2026 and is developing it for
publication.

Before training as a psychotherapist, Max spent more than two decades in
entrepreneurship — an experience that continues to shape his interest in how people
navigate uncertainty, form bonds in unfamiliar conditions, and make meaning when
the ground shifts beneath them. He hosts the podcast Becoming Existential, exploring
what it means to practise, think, and live existentially.

A Certificate of Attendance will be emailed to participants.

If you think you have a new and interesting topic to share with us and would like to be our next speaker please, don’t hesitate to contact our events organiser on events@existentialanalysis.org.uk.