Unknowing as Truth: Clinical Presence, Paradox, and Process
This presentation explores the clinical and ethical implications of not-knowing in psychoanalysis. It examines how analytic work may deepen when we loosen commitments to mastery, premature recognition, and overly linear models of meaning, and instead make room for recursive process, paradox, and forms of experience that can be approached only indirectly. Drawing on themes from Unknowing as Truth: Epistemic Inversions and the Recursive Psyche and Curved Being, Knowing, and Ethics in Psychoanalysis: Möbius Inflections, the talk will consider how clinical presence may become more receptive to what emerges obliquely, belatedly, or in excess of immediate formulation.
Event & Registration Details
- Date & Time: Friday, July 24, 2026 | 3:30 PM – 5:00 PM ET
- Format: Live Online via Zoom (1.5 CE Hours)
- Registration Deadline: Friday, July 24, at 1:00 PM ET
- Access Details: Zoom access details will be emailed between 1:00 PM and 2:00 PM on the day of the event.
- Sponsor: NPAP's 2026 Summer CE Series Program
Presenter & Moderator
Presenter: Todd Anderson, PhD, PsyD, LP
Moderator: Thomas S. Taylor, PhD, LCSW-R
Dr. Todd Anderson is a psychoanalyst and author whose clinical and theoretical work explores dissociation, symbolic form, recursive structure, and epistemology. He is the author of four volumes in Routledge’s Psychoanalysis in a New Key series. His most recent journal work is an online publication in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association entitled "Ferenczi, trauma, and the dialectic of coherence and containment" (2026). Dr. Anderson consults Nancy McWilliams regularly and trained with Otto Kernberg’s Transference-Focused Psychotherapy (TFP) seminar in 2024–2025, focusing on advanced, manualized treatment for severe personality disorders like Borderline and Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).
Learning Objectives
After attending the presentation, participants will be able to:
- Describe how recursive process, paradox, and indirect approaches to experience can deepen psychoanalytic work.
- Differentiate between analytic approaches organized around mastery, premature recognition, and linear meaning, and approaches that make room for uncertainty, recursion, and emergent forms of understanding.
Tuition & Admission
- NPAP Members: $30
- Other Professionals: $45
- Candidates: $20