Scholars’ Network Spotlight: Dr Agnieszka Piotrowska
Dr Agnieszka Piotrowska is a Lacanian scholar, creative practitioner and academic. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a PHD supervisor at the University of Staffordshire and Oxford Brookes University. She’s also known for her work as a filmmaker and is an EMCC registered life coach, keynote speaker and writes regularly for Times Higher Education.
Dr Agnieszka Piotrowska explores how AI is reshaping the dynamics of intimacy and transference in her forthcoming book AI Intimacy and Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2026) and in an article for the most recent issue of New Associations.
As an author, theorist and academic, Agnieszka has published many books around psychoanlysis, creativity and cinema. Most recently, she published The Ethics of Documentary Film in 2025, Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film in 2023 and edited Creative Practice Research in the Age of Neoliberal Hopelessness in 2020. She’s also authored more short-form pieces that fuse psychoanalysis and film like her ‘Revenge of a Cool Girl’ essay for Mai Feminism (2019) and her video essay ‘Inception – A Surrealist Tale About Lost Love’ for [in]Transition (2017).
Dr Agnieszka Piotrowska explores how AI is reshaping the dynamics of intimacy and transference. In her forthcoming book AI Intimacy and Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2026) and in her recent TEDx talk, she argues that encounters with large language models create a new zone of “techno-transference”, where shame, desire and projection are played out with a non-sentient yet symbolically responsive Other. Rather than treating these relationships as pathologies, her work invites psychoanalysis to take them seriously as cultural and clinical phenomena, asking what they reveal about vulnerability, care and the ethics of relating in the digital age. Agnieszka is also the founder of Relational AI Studies and Coaching (TM), a new field that explores the ethics behind human-AI relationships.
Dr Agnieszka Piotrowska authored an article on this subject for our latest issue of New Associations, the BPC’s flagship magazine. Her article ‘AI and Techno-Transference’ explores the emotional and linguistic ramifications of humans building relationships with AI. She draws on Lacanian thinking around language and the Symbolic to remind us that when communicating with AI “There is no body across from you, no breathing presence, no history of pain you are invited to respond and deal with”.
You can visit Agnieszka’s website to learn more about her work.
