Black February: how AI triggered a sell-off on Wall Street

On February 23, the financial market was hit by a wave of sell-offs after an alarmist scenario from Citrini Research swirled in the network. It predicted the total replacement of office staff by AI, the collapse of consumption and the collapse of the stock market. We've seen technological euphoria replaced in an instant by panic over global unemployment. A little earlier, a new tool from Anthropic collapsed company quotes in several sectors. Psychologist Michael Tegin looked at what happened from the point of view of psychoanalysis - as a giant projection of the collective unconscious.

When an investor opens a brokerage application, he is sure that he is driven by logic and rational pursuit of profit. According to Freud, this is called the "reality principle". In practice, the market is a space where the pleasure principle - often the opposite of the reality principle - exists and even sometimes dominates. In the context of financial markets, this is the dictatorship of "I want to make money right now", this is the desire for quick rewards.

The libidinal drives are expressed through them - it's not about sex. Freud defined them as the psychic energy of life, the thirst for creation, possession and connection. In the context of investing, it's that "fuel mix" that makes us crave an asset, see it appreciate in value, experience the pleasure of profit and the excitement of looking at charts. It is physiologically close to ecstasy.

From a psychoanalytic perspective, investing is not math, but a constant process of moving energies and drives.

The British psychoanalyst Ma's Klein introduced the concepts of "good" and "bad" object - a person in infancy divides the world into that which gives satisfaction (mother's breast is the first thing that brings pleasure to each of us), and that which hurts, causes discomfort.

An investor often behaves the same way. When a stock grows, it becomes a "good object" that brings pleasure by increasing profits. For example, Tesla stock was perceived not just as an investment, but as a symbol of the technological future - investors endowed this asset with special properties, criticism was perceived as an attack on the very idea of progress. But when quotations turn around, the asset instantly becomes "bad". At this point, there is a risk of falling into a state of "paranoid-schizoid position" - when we start blaming the fall of the asset on some "puppeteers", the Fed or manipulators, just to avoid admitting that our choice of an ideal object has failed us.

French psychoanalysts Françoise Dolto and Jacques Lacan wrote extensively about the role of the Father as a symbol of law and order, both in the family and in virtually any society. In the world of investing, we subconsciously look for a strong figure to look up to - this is partly why Warren Buffett, the "ideal" investor with a high-yield portfolio, is so popular.

Such a figure and such a reference point kind of takes the burden of responsibility for the uncertainty of the future off of us, because we know that uncertainty has come and gone, and despite this, the "ideal investor" still wins. We trust that "Father" knows the way and will save us from the chaos of the market. When the leader is wrong, the investor experiences it not as a financial loss, but as a deep personal betrayal.

In addition, buying shares of Elon Musk, Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos is often not a calculation for profit, but an identification with the hero - with the CEO of the company or its founder. The work of this mechanism is manifested, in particular, in the unconscious belief-rule "If I do like Buffett, I become like Buffett myself".

Sigmund Freud, in later works, such as "Beyond the Pleasure Principle," identified two basic drives in each person: Eros, responsible for creation, the attraction to life; and Thanatos, responsible for the attraction to death and destruction. Investment Eros is long-term accumulation, creation of capital, care about one's future and the future of one's children. It is also investment in innovation, infrastructure development, medicine. Investment Thanatos is a craving for unjustified risk, trading with huge leverage, betting everything on one asset at once. This willingness to take risks manifests an unconscious urge to "destroy" one's investment portfolio.

Sabina Spielrein, a psychoanalyst and one of Freud's patients, was the first to notice that destructiveness can be closely related to creativity. Many traders subconsciously seek to "drain" a deposit in order to experience an acute sense of catharsis or to punish themselves for "bad behavior" in the market because of guilt. If you are repeatedly zeroing out your account, it is possible that your unconscious is now "loaded" with the urge for destruction, self-destruction, rather than enrichment.

Human financial behavior is closely related to one of the stages of early development - from one and a half to three years of age, the child first encounters the demands of the outside world and discipline. In classical Freudian psychoanalysis, it is believed that during this period a person gets the first experience of managing property, personal boundaries and power. These experiences are fixed in us almost by the principle of imprinting, like ducklings. Sigmund Freud himself emphasized that these primary patterns of behavior are directly transferable to capital work. We can now see how Citrini Research's report on the future of AI has shattered investors' illusion of control. This document and AI act here as a "demanding parent" that can rob a person of their creative function (working in an office) and threatens to "punish" them with various losses. In the face of this, the investor may regress to a childish fear that "what I have created and owned may be taken away or devalued by an outside force".

Investing according to psychoanalysis is a constant movement of energies and development. Based on this, we can identify several important principles that will help you better understand your unconscious drives and manage your financial portfolio more effectively.

- Stop seeing stocks as "bad" or "good" - they just either make money or they don't.

- Realize whose figure you are looking for in a CEO - a partner or an "almighty daddy". If it is the latter, he may be too idealized.

- Recognize that there is an attraction to destruction that wants excitement and risk, and allocate it a "safe sandbox" - a small portion of the portfolio - so that it doesn't destroy all of the savings.

This article was AI-translated and verified by a human editor