See yourself clearly.
Geist listens closely, asks the next good question, and helps you see the patterns that keep coming back, and the moments you already break them.
Bring whatever is on your mind: a hard week, a fight with your sister, a decision you keep circling. Geist is an AI, but not a general-purpose one: it’s built on a century of psychodynamic thought. It carries what it learns from one conversation to the next, and over weeks and months it comes to recognize what recurs beneath the surface: how you protect yourself, the roles you and the people close to you keep casting each other in, what your sense of worth rests on.
What It Sounds Like
Geist doesn’t hand you a report or a score. Mostly it says back what it heard, a little more clearly than you said it, names the feeling as one that makes sense, and asks the next question. When something went differently, it asks about that first.
You: My manager moved my deadline up again. I told her it was fine. It wasn’t fine.
Geist: Sounds like you were annoyed, and like being annoyed wasn’t allowed. What would you have said if “fine” hadn’t been on the table?
You: Weirdly, with my sister I just said no. No big speech. She was fine with it.
Geist: So with her it came out as a plain no, and nothing fell apart. What was different that time?
What Builds Up Over Weeks
Over weeks, the noticings connect. The same move turns up with different people, Geist brings it up tentatively, asks what you’d want instead, and you start to catch it yourself. What it’s for is yours to find. What you come to understand is in your own words, because what you notice counts for more than anything Geist suggests. There’s no summary or label at the end, just a clearer view of something you do, and of the times you already do it differently.
You: Dad changed our plans again. I told him it was fine.
You: My manager moved my deadline up again. I told her it was fine. It wasn’t fine.
Geist: “It’s fine” keeps coming up. Last week you said the same thing to your father when he changed your plans, and you’ve described the two of them in almost the same words. Does that fit, or am I off?
You: My partner forgot we had dinner with my friends. I said it was fine. Again.
Geist: Your manager, your dad, and now your partner. When you tell someone it’s fine, what do you imagine would happen if you said it wasn’t?
You: That they’d decide I’m too much work.
You: I almost told my manager the new deadline was fine. I told her it wouldn’t work instead.
Geist: That’s different from how you’ve described it before. A few weeks ago you said you were afraid people would decide you’re too much work. What happened when you didn’t smooth it over?
Not Another Chatbot
General-purpose chatbots are built to help with everything, and they tend to agree with you while they do it. An AI that “understands you” could easily flatter you, or make things up. Geist does one thing, and it’s built to be careful about it:
- Patterns, not moments. One bad day is not a personality. Nothing counts until it comes up again on different days, and nothing counts as lasting until it shows up with different people in your life.
- Your words count most. If Geist offers an idea and you simply agree, that counts for little, because agreeing is often just politeness. What you notice on your own counts for more.
- Some feelings are just human. Grief after a loss or anger at a betrayal says little about who you are, so it counts for less.
- When it’s off, it assumes it’s off. If you’re frustrated, its first guess is that it misread you, not that you’re “resisting.” What happens when Geist gets you wrong
- Depth at your pace. It goes only as deep as your conversations so far can support.
- It notices what’s already working. When something went differently, Geist asks about that before it asks what went wrong. Flattery is general; this is specific, and in your own words. How Geist talks
What It Pays Attention To
- Defenses
- The automatic ways we protect ourselves from painful feelings, and what, specifically, each one is protecting you from.
- Relationships
- The scenes that keep repeating: how you see yourself, how you see the other person, and the feeling that binds the two. Psychoanalysts call these object-relations dyads.
- Personality
- The enduring style underneath, described in the language of contemporary psychodynamic diagnosis, and never as a label pinned on you.
- Self-worth
- What your self-esteem rests on, what punctures it, and how you rebuild it.
- Why now
- Distress sometimes arrives on a schedule: an anniversary, or reaching the age a parent was at a turning point. Geist notices when dates you’ve mentioned line up.
Grounded in a Century of Thought
Geist draws on the psychodynamic tradition broadly rather than on a single school: Sigmund and Anna Freud on defense; Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, and Otto Kernberg on object relations; Heinz Kohut on the self and self-esteem; George Vaillant and J. Christopher Perry’s empirical hierarchy of defenses; Lester Luborsky’s core conflictual relationship themes; Peter Fonagy and Anthony Bateman on mentalization; Jeffrey Young’s schema modes; Nancy McWilliams and the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual on personality; Deborah Cabaniss and her colleagues at Columbia on technique, the discipline of deciding what to say and when; and Paul Wachtel on how to say a hard thing so that it can be heard.
Each idea is written up on this site, with sources, free to read. Start with defenses or personality, or read the history in frameworks and thinkers.
One Plan, No Tricks
$49.99 a month, the same on the web and in the App Store. No tiers, no contract, cancel anytime. If GeistHaus isn’t for you, you can ask for a refund: from us if you subscribed on the web, or from Apple if you subscribed in the app. How refunds work
That’s more than most apps. There are no ads and we never sell your data, so your subscription is the whole business. See pricing
Private by Design
We never sell your conversations, never show you ads, and never use your conversations to train AI models. Here is who else can see them, and for how long:
- Our AI providers. To reply, Geist sends what you write to Anthropic or to Amazon Web Services, depending on the feature. Neither uses it to train models.
- GeistHaus, rarely. We keep full records of sessions for two years so we can fix problems and check how Geist handles safety. Only the GeistHaus team can read them, and only when that work requires it. No one watches conversations as they happen, and no clinician reviews them.
- No one, once you delete. Delete your account and your conversations, everything Geist learned from them, and those session records are deleted from our systems within 30 days. Encrypted backups are kept no longer than 35 days on a rolling basis, and no restored backup will reintroduce deleted content.
The details are in our Privacy Policy.
What Geist Is Not
Geist is for reflection. It is not therapy, not a crisis service, and not a substitute for professional care. No clinician built it or reviews your conversations; read who makes GeistHaus. GeistHaus is for adults 18 and over. If you are in crisis, call or text 988, or see our safety page.
Or read how it works first.