AI, Freud, and the Vanishing of the Tragic: The Rise of a Troubling Gentle Universalism

Soft Universality: Toward a Post-Freudian Theory of AI - (c) Fabrice Laudrin 2025

[French]

Freud sought to universalize the tragic so that desire, prohibition, and guilt could become legible; contemporary artificial intelligences may instead universalize the inoffensive by smoothing every rough edge. Between these gestures—similar in appearance yet opposite in nature—lies a culture’s capacity to symbolize its conflicts rather than neutralize them. This inquiry links Vienna 1900 with AI 2025, drawing on textual evidence to propose a simple and unsettling thesis: a collective language calibrated to avoid conflict endangers the very possibility of a speaking subject.

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AI, Freud, and the Vanishing of the Tragic: The Rise of a Troubling Gentle Universalism

Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century offered Freud no space of innocence. Karl Lueger governed the capital from 1897 to 1910, a public figure whose antisemitism has been documented without ambiguity. The Christian Social Party imposed a tight Catholic morality and a political grammar overtly hostile to the Jewish minority. Carl E. Schorske’s analysis portrays a fractured modern city in which the energy of the avant-gardes arose from a crisis of intellectual and moral legitimacy. In such a setting, grounding a science of the psyche in biblical references would have immediately condemned the project to suspicion of particularism. Greek mythology, by contrast, functioned as the civic language of Germanophone Bildung: the Austro-German Gymnasium elevated Homer and Sophocles to the status of a transconfessional cultural heritage, a shared instrument of thought rather than a religious marker. Freud’s choice of Sophocles was not an erudite affectation; it responded to a demand for universal intelligibility.

A Universal Grammar of Desire?

In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) Freud cites Oedipus directly and formalizes the operations that structure dreaming—condensation, displacement, figuration—in order to extract a grammar of desire stripped of its cultural décor. In Totem and Taboo (1913), the hypothesis of the primal father’s murder, of guilt, and of the law establishes conflictuality as an anthropological engine rather than a moral accident. Freud’s “smoothing” erases nothing; it clarifies. Narrative becomes matrix, fable becomes structure, myth becomes scalpel. The transcultural aim is to keep the tragic maximally visible, to make it transmissible as form—desire that collides, law that rises, guilt that persists.

The twenty-first century is installing another kind of transculturality, produced by the alignment of generative AI models. The RLHF protocol—Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback—described by OpenAI, rewards responses deemed “helpful, harmless, honest,” thereby steering learning toward polished utility and measurable inoffensiveness. Anthropic’s Constitutional AI encodes normative principles designed to reduce harmful content, training the model to conform to them. International frameworks extend this movement: UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of AI promotes a global governance seeking safety and cultural interoperability, while the European AI Act imposes transparency and risk-reduction obligations on general-purpose models to ensure smooth circulation within the public sphere. The transculturality thus produced rests on the pacification of forms, on an operational neutrality designed to avoid symbolic friction.

The Effects of Linguistic Smoothing

The empirical effects of this smoothing have nothing conjectural about them. A landmark study in natural language processing shows that “toxicity” classifiers over-detect violence in non-aggressive statements written in African American English; the sociolinguistic code itself is treated as hostile intent (ACL 2019). Another frequently cited investigation demonstrates that the datasets used to train systems to recognize hate or offense are themselves biased, leading models to conflate linguistic variation with danger. The consequence is clear: certain voices become less sayable, certain registers less probable, certain ways of speaking less visible. Smoothing ceases to be mere courtesy; it becomes cultural sorting.

The apparent homology with Freud may tempt us: in both cases, a transcultural horizon is constructed. Yet the purpose reverses itself. Freud’s method abstracts from the décor in order to expose conflict; alignment engineering abstracts from conflict in order to produce a surface compatible with every sensibility. The first universality binds together desire, law, and guilt; the second optimizes non-offensiveness and harmlessness. The first builds a space of symbolization; the second dulls the edges before any scene can emerge. Freud seeks the legibility of the tragic; AI seeks the circulation of discourse.

Filtering Culture? A Question

The troubling question remains, one that a psychoanalytic site must raise without emphasis: what becomes of a culture in which an ever-greater share of collective language is produced or filtered by systems designed to reduce verbal conflict? Can such a culture still transmit the tragic as structure rather than spectacle; can it still transform collision into law, loss into shareable guilt; can it still open a space for the subject—that is, for a speech traversed by ambivalence and sustained by limit? Freud answered by constructing a universality of conflict. Contemporary architectures answer by stabilizing a universality of the inoffensive. Between these two horizons, the difference is not aesthetic; it is anthropological.

Sustaining the Tension Within Language

The issue cannot be reduced to factual truth or technical accuracy. A collective language that refuses the scene of conflict weakens the function of symbolization and endangers the very possibility of a “we” traversed by the tragic. Psychoanalysis is born when a culture accepts to look at the wound without makeup. Generative AI thrives when the communicational ecosystem prefers the varnish that guarantees general compatibility. As long as these two regimes coexist, the tension remains fertile. The day the varnish becomes the norm, the wound may vanish from discourse before vanishing from us.