Abstract: “Auto-Intimacy: The Social & Ethical Implications of Algorithmic Therapies” engages with therapeutic and psychiatric treatment by algorithmic and other automated therapies. At the earliest moment of experimentation with automated therapies, two strains of work emerged: the simulation and detection of a disordered mind in the hopes of automating intake, diagnosis, and psychological education, and the wholesale simulation of a therapist toward the dream of automating therapeutic treatment to batch process patients. Each tradition was responsive to pressures on mental health care at midcentury, as well as new understandings of the mind that appeared in the same period. This talk offers an overview of the social and ethical implications of these treatments as they move from care to capture to control across the second half of the 20th century into our present. Zeavin will interrogate the democratizing logics that escort these technologies, ask what therapy becomes when the traditional therapist is replaced by a computational actor, and conclude with some thoughts about how the history of these attempts can inform current policy and ethics debates about the deployment of these technologies.