Unknowing as Truth: Epistemic Inversions and the Recursive Psyche

By Todd Anderson

Unknowing as Truth reframes psychoanalysis as a discipline of recursive hospitality through the lens of epistemic inversion--treating unknowing not as deficit but as the living medium of analytic truth.

This book invites clinicians to work at the rim of symbolization--where refusals, reversals, and surprises preserve vitality--and cultivate an ethic of presence that lets meaning arrive without force. It shifts the axis from paradox to inversion, toward a recursive, "curved" epistemology that privileges atmosphere over linear mastery and recasts the analytic field as a participatory climate. Chapters map the grammar of inversion, articulate "ethical refusal" as protection of remainder, and show how recursive return keeps analysis alive when language thins. It integrates classical theory, contemporary relational work and post-structural thought drawing on cross-disciplinary strands of poetry, music, and visual art as models of open form. Anderson establishes a coherent clinical method for working with not-knowing--moving beyond "tolerance of ambiguity."

With a rich blend of clinical vignettes, teaching pathways, study prompts, and a lexicon for supervision, this book offers a teachable, clinically resonant architecture for psychoanalysts.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1041255209
• ISBN13: 9781041255208
• Release Date: May 2026
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 330 Pages