Curved Being, Knowing, and Ethics in Psychoanalysis
Description
In Curved Being, Knowing, and Ethics in Psychoanalysis, Todd Anderson develops a Möbius model of analytic life in which knowing and being fold continuously into one another.
The book explores how ethical orientation arises within the curved structure of analytic perception itself, where epistemology and ontology invert through recursive movement. Drawing on Winnicott, Loewald, Levinas, Derrida, and contemporary relational psychoanalysis, Anderson develops a curved topology of analytic experience in which subject and object emerge as Möbius inflections within a shared field. Clinical vignettes, philosophical reflections, and engagements with music and aesthetic form demonstrate how paradox operates as a generative condition of analytic life rather than a problem to be resolved.
By reframing psychoanalysis through topology and ethical relation, Curved Being offers clinicians and theorists a new vocabulary for working with uncertainty and symbolic remainder while remaining grounded in the immediacy of the analytic encounter.
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Person
Todd Anderson, PhD, PsyD, is a New York-based psychoanalyst in private practice. His writing explores recursive process, analytic presence, and symbolic remainder within curved psychoanalysis, integrating object relations, relational theory, and contemporary philosophy. He is the author of The Fragmented Self, Recognition, and the Edge of Desire; Gravitational Psyche; and Unknowing as Truth.
Content
Orientation: Curved Psychoanalysis and the Arc of the Work Part I: The Turn: Epistemic Curvature and the Collapse of Obviousness 1. The Möbius Turn 2. Obviousness as Orientation 3. Remainder as Ontological Curvature Interlude I: The Tear Part II: Life on a One-Sided Surface 4. Möbius Enactment: When Knowing Becomes Being 5. Projection and Projective Identification as Micro-Twists 6. The Möbius Unconscious 7. Dissociation and the Tear: When Orientation Collapses Interlude II: On the Refusal of the Case 8. Analytic Presence as Movement Along the Surface 9. Symbolization on a One-Sided Surface Part III: Time Without Exit 10. Time on the Möbius: Recurrence, Return, and Ethics of Re-Entering 11. Time Without Exit: Recursion, Survival, and the Refusal of Resolution Interlude III: Staying 12. Living Without Resolution: The Ethics of Unfinished Time Closing: Curved Being 13. Closing: Curved Being