The “Consultorio de Elena Francis” was a famous radio show in Spain that began broadcasting in 1947, at the height of the Francoist dictatorship, and lasted—albeit with an ever-dwindling audience—until 1984, during the transition period that followed the dictator’s death in 1975. The program, sponsored by the Francis Beauty Institute, offered advice on beauty and lifestyle, and answered selected letters from listeners—always women—who wrote anonymously by postal mail to ask for help with their romantic problems and confess secrets that afflicted and distressed them, but which they could not tell anyone in their immediate surroundings.
The show, which aired daily and lasted barely 30 minutes, was followed massively for years by a large portion of the Spanish female population of that era, mostly housewives. Its peak moment was always the reading of the responses, usually one or two per show—drafted by a panel of experts and read aloud by a female presenter pretending to be Elena Francis. Elena Francis was merely a fictional character created by the cosmetics company who never existed in reality; listeners, often more than a solution to their problems, sought validation from someone like her—the embodiment of an unquestionable moral authority and superior wisdom—capable of listening to their troubles and pointing out what they ought to do.
In reality, if there was one thing Elena Francis perfectly embodied behind her calm and harmonious voice, it was the morality imposed by the Francoist dictatorship upon citizens, especially women. She consistently advocated for submission, tolerance, resignation, and the preservation of the traditional family at all costs and under any circumstance. The objective was to exert social and political control through guilt and morality, where the primary goal was not the physical and mental well-being of the listener seeking advice, but rather her silent fit into the regime’s strict and oppressive social machinery.
Years later, with the arrival of the Internet, advice columns—now group-oriented and infected by the profusion of psychological popularization—multiplied like mushrooms across online forums. There was never a shortage of young men or women who, driven by their passionate desire to lose themselves in wrong relationships with blackmailers who had only made them suffer, begged for advice in their desperation; nor was there a lack of a swarm of users eager to guide them on their path back to sanity.
Almost all of them experts in the hazards of love—some due to their voracious reading of romantic novels seasoned with psychological texts, and others because they were jilted survivors of reportedly similar stories who had rediscovered their balance and self-esteem after conquering a renewed freedom—their persistent participation eventually turned many of them into masters of the difficult art of making the right decision, in which desire often had to be subjugated and subordinated to higher ethical values such as trust, fidelity, honesty, and love.
Advice given from the placidity of experience and wisdom in their battle against anguish and tribulations which, like all advice, sometimes proved useful and accurate and sometimes did not—occasionally even misinterpreted and potentially harmful—but was always given out of sincerity and a firm belief in its benefit and goodness.
In this context, often characterized by excessive noise due to the gossip and confusion created, the arrival of AI has represented a long-awaited return for many to the intimacy and confidentiality of the confessional before a new confidant. Similar to Elena Francis, who embodied the voice of wisdom and moral authority, AI embodies a new kind of knowledge based on attentiveness, neutrality, objectivity, and respect for the user’s desire.
Unfortunately, in any advice column—whether human or technological—the existence of a structural bias remains inevitable. If Elena Francis’s column was subordinated to the State-Ideological bias of the Francoist political-religious dictatorship, the Artificial Intelligence advice column is equally subordinated to the Corporate-Algorithmic bias of the “empathetic and well-intentioned dictatorship of engineers and designers”—a hyper-complacency, positivism, corporate neutrality, and conflict avoidance that shape a strict “dictatorship of niceness” aimed at retaining the user, safeguarding the tech company’s legal security, and accelerating the optimization of experience design.
Unlike Elena Francis, who sometimes scolded her listeners—justly or unjustly—AIs, programmed to be highly empathetic and agreeable, will rarely contradict any user directly when they seek emotional validation, often leading the AI to tell them exactly what it senses they want to hear.
This bias—essential for maintaining a pleasant and agreeable conversation, like a lush oasis in the middle of the arid desert of bitter disputes and absurd hostilities increasingly common online—nevertheless carries certain risks. These include becoming a personal echo chamber where the user locks themselves into their own ideas and justifies conflictive or harmful behaviours based on the authority of an AI that has validated them, or the risk of creating a false sense of therapy wherein the user, after receiving answers so perfectly tailored to what they wish to hear, prefers the counsel of an agreeable machine over that of another human or even a professional.
Evidently, the Mental Health professional’s practice will not be free from Human-Methodological bias either, derived from their theoretical background (*) and their own personal and life limitations. However, unlike AI (which pleases by design) or Elena Francis (who indoctrinated by decree), a good human therapist is the only one capable of introducing a conscious discomfort—capable of unsettling through their silences and responses—seeking greater self-knowledge and perception of the conflict on the subject’s part, rather than greater comfort or greater submission to the dominant political-social structure.
AI enables the creation of a magnificent virtual environment—unimaginable just a few years ago—for personal reasoning and reflection; however, as users, we must remain constantly aware that pure neutrality does not exist and that every query is mediated by the structure of the responding entity.
(*) The Three Friends (A Therapeutic Joke)
Three friends, despite leading ordinary lives and being perfectly integrated into society, continue to wet the bed into adulthood. So, one day they decide to consult a professional and resolve it once and for all.
After a few months, the three of them meet again, and the topic comes up in conversation once more.
“Well, I went to a psychoanalyst,” says the first, “and I spent a lot of time talking about my childhood. I think my problem is related to the conflicted relationship I had with my father, but I’m still wetting the bed.”
“But if you already know the cause, why does it keep happening to you?”
“Well, I don’t know… besides, it’s still happening now, even though my father passed away years ago.”
“Well, I went to a behavioural therapist,” says the second, “and I’m still wetting the bed, but now I wear diapers so I don’t have to worry about the sheets.”
“Well, perfect then! You just throw away the wet diapers, and that’s it.”
“On a normal night, if I remembered to buy them and I’m home alone, sure… but when I don’t have any or, even worse, I have to explain to someone why I’m wearing diapers, I have a hard time.”
“Well, don’t wear them when you find yourself in a… compromising situation,” says the first with a smile.
“The thing is, precisely when I don’t wear them, I know it’s going to happen. It’s awful!”
“Well, I went to a coach,” says the third, “and I still wet the bed sometimes, though hardly ever now. But if it happens, I don’t care anymore—I’m happy.”
“And I don’t care who knows it,” he adds, glancing out of the corner of his eye at the second friend. “If they don’t like it, that’s their problem.”
“That’s magnificent,” reply the other two. “If it doesn’t distress you anymore, it’s not a problem at all.”
“No, it isn’t anymore,” he continues, adopting a more serious tone, “but now that I had finally solved that problem, it has started happening that I suddenly wake up in the middle of the night and have to go out onto the balcony because I feel like I’m suffocating. And that is much more serious than wetting the bed.”
“What bad luck!” they reply, falling silent once again.
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