Psychotherapy and Artificial Intelligence: A Proposal for Alignment

Brief Psychotherapy assists patients to become aware and change their behavior when facing an immediate emotional conflict, and to implement a transformation process through actions of listening, observing, increasing awareness and making interventions. Therapeutic work employs tools and techniques to trigger a process of change, emphasizing cognitive and affective understanding. This article presents an approach that combines Psychology and Artificial Intelligence with the purpose of enhancing psychotherapy with computer-implemented tools. This approach highlights the intersection between these two knowledge areas and shows how machine intelligence can help to characterize affective areas, construct genograms, determine degree of differentiation of self, investigate cognitive interaction patterns, and achieve self-awareness and redefinition. The conceptual proposal was implemented by a web application, and a sample of computer-aided analysis is presented.