Autorentext

Todd Anderson, PhD, PsyD is a psychoanalyst practicing in New York City. His work explores how dissociation and desire shape psychic survival, bringing together insights from object relations, relational psychoanalysis, and contemporary philosophy.

Klappentext

Gravitational Psyche draws on ideas from physics, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, to propose a radical reframing of how subjectivity is structured and sustained.

What if the psyche, like the cosmos, is governed by invisible curves and recursive loops? Exploring how symbolic atmosphere, affective orbit, and curved epistemologies shape experience from the ground up, this volume integrates psychoanalytic theory with metaphors drawn from physics, nonduality, and recursive form. It develops a topological and recursive framework for analytic practice: the mind as a curved field, shaped by symbolic tension, relational mass, and recursive returns. Anderson presents the psyche not as a static structure but as a gravitational space, where repetition, collapse, and atmosphere reveal the curved nature of subjectivity. It further equips readers to orient, listen, and intervene where language thins, helping analysis preserve vitality without forcing premature coherence. This book offers readers a fresh vocabulary for working at the edge of symbolization.

Bridging theory and practice with vivid clinical illustrations, conceptual maps, and a study guide designed to support teaching and supervision, this book is key reading for all psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.

Inhalt

Part I: Orbits and Singularities - Framing the Psyche Beyond Newton and Freud 1. The Original Paradox, Refracted 2. The Curvature of Psychic Space: Orbit, Structure, and Symbolic Distortion 3. Chronotopes of the Self: Structural Temporality and Character Style Part II: Gravity ad Symptom - From Repetition to Field: Freud's Echo, Klein's Trace 4. Orbiting the Invisible: Symptom as Gravitational Trace 5. The Analyst's Gravity: Transference and Countertransference Fields Part III: Recursion and Return - Time Looped and Folded: From Drive to Pattern 6. Echoes and Foldings: Repetition Compulsion and Recursive Return 7. The Holographic Mind: Collapse, Condensation, and Symbolic Atmosphere Part IV: Form and Emptiness - From Klein's Void to the Curvature of Form 8. Nonduality in the Split Mind: Perceiving the Ground 9. Symbolizing the Light: Emptiness, Form, and the Clinical Imagination Interlude: Gravitational Emptiness - Four Psychic Atmospheres 11. Two Tongues for One Mind - Buddhism and Psychoanalysis Part V: Beyond Frame - Freud's Horizon and the Analyst's Cosmos 12. The Analysts in the Cosmos 13. A Mode of Knowing That Does Not Collapse 14. Afterward: What It Has Meant to Write This Book 15. Coda: Symbol of the Singularity