The Limits of Imagination: A Lacanian Critique of Empathy and Understanding in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

Abstract

With the growing popularity of LLM-based chatbots and AI such as ChatGPT, some users have been taking to using AI as a method of therapy, experiencing severe transference and other maladaptive consequences. The flaws of empathy-based understanding become more pronounced in these cases due to the wholly different existence of AI in comparison to humanity, accentuating the inherent and insurmountable Otherness that even a fellow human being would have. Similar attempts and failures in understanding artificial intelligence that mimics but cannot replicate human beings are depicted in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). His androids are characterized as being artificial constructs that are uncanny in their similarities and disturbing in their differences from human beings: being created—not born—as fully formed consciousnesses, the androids carry an essential difference that differentiates them from human beings. According to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, human beings undergo a series of complex processes that establish the sense of Self during infancy by undergoing the Mirror Stage, the resolution of the Oedipal Complex, and the split caused by the establishment of language in the unconscious. The androids of Electric Sheep, not having gone through these processes, are marked by an abstractness that makes them unable to empathize, though the human characters of the novel attempt to, putting them in moral and spiritual peril. By examining Electric Sheep through the lens of Lacanian psychoanalysis and articulating the differences between human beings and androids as depicted in the text, and the subsequent failure of human attempts to empathize with androids.