The Impossible Return – Psychoanalytic Reflections on Breast Cancer, Loss, and Mourning is a work of creative nonfiction and autotheory. It is part cancer memoir, part psychoanalytic theorizing, and part history of late Soviet Ukraine.
Anna Fishzon’s personal narrative is interspersed with interludes exploring other “reconstructions” (Chernobyl’s sarcophagus, the perestroika years) as well as psychoanalytic reflections on anxiety, prosthesis, hypochondria, and tattooing. The authorial voice is intentionally polyphonic: elegiac, humorous, at times academic and philosophical. Each chapter is set in the context of the writing process, with discussion of the Covid-19 pandemic and war in Ukraine. The prologue examines the psychoanalyst’s bodily presence in treatment and includes clinical vignettes that discuss the impact of remote therapy sessions during lockdown, and an epilogue provides a meditation on repetition compulsion and the impossibility of mourning fully.
Through theoretical and personal reflections on mourning and recovery after catastrophic collapses of psyche, body, and place, this book makes original contributions to psychoanalysis, Slavic and cultural studies, trauma studies, film criticism, and history. This unique work will be relevant to readers interested in psychoanalytic studies, cancer and disability studies and critical theory, and academics of autotheory and memoir.
Table of Contents:
Prologue: The Body of the Analyst 1. Technology 2. Looking Inside 3. The Zone 4. Cut! 5. "...not without object" 6. The Sarcophagus 7. A Dialogue on Loss: Love Letters to Audre Lorde 8. Queer Temporalities 9. Prosthesis 10. Perestroika 11. Anniversary 12. The Voice 13. Tattoo Epilogue: Rem(a)inder References
About the Author :
Anna Fishzon is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. She is the author and coeditor of two previous books.
Review :
'In this remarkable and vibrant book, Anna Fishzon has created a unique tapestry of cultural history, psychoanalysis, and her own journey through illness. Beautifully written, it is disturbing, funny, painful, and enlightening, offering important insights into not just the practice and theory of psychoanalysis but the intimate experience of illness and the body. This is a work of real generosity that deserves a wide readership.'
Darian Leader, psychoanalyst, Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, London
'Does the psychoanalyst have a body? With courage and exquisite flair Anna Fishzon takes this question head-on through her lived experience of cancer, showing how the navigation of sickness, loss, and the reality of dying gives us the knot of all psychic transformations. Yes, the analyst has a body, one that is called upon to be irrepressibly alive until lost. I learned that there is no other way to understand psychoanalysis than in the experience of a body’s breakdown and survival.'
Jamieson Webster, author of On Breathing
'In The Impossible Return, Fishzon takes the thread of her personal experience as a breast cancer survivor and powerfully weaves and connects threads as diverse as psychoanalytic theory and clinic, opera, queer temporality, Chernobyl, philosophy, childhood in the Soviet Union/Ukraine, literature, and film, to name just a few. Crafting a book that not only works so stunningly well across such varied registers but also makes a truly remarkable contribution to all of these fields amounts to nothing short of achieving the impossible.'
Alenka Zupančič, author of What Is Sex?
'By rights, The Impossible Return should be an impossible book: a cancer memoir unlike any other, it deftly combines the author’s thoughts on the female body, Soviet animation, the Chernobyl disaster, and queer culture, not to mention Lacanian psychoanalysis. Her beautiful prose makes it all look effortless, weaving together all these topics in a thoroughly engaging manner. Fishzon eschews self-help in favor of self-analysis, but it is her readers who will reap the benefits.'
Eliot Borenstein, New York University
'Psychoanalyst and historian Anna Fishzon has produced a beautifully written, courageous, and utterly compelling book. Using psychoanalysis to reflect on opera, Soviet children’s cartoons, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and much, much more, Fishzon moves gracefully between the theoretical and the concrete. Lending the book intensity and urgency is the fact that it is animated by the author’s experience of breast cancer surgery. The book can be described as a literary free association engaging the cultural and the clinical, the historical and the psychoanalytic, all lent vital coherence through their relation to the body of the analyst-author.'
Thomas Kohut, professor of History, emeritus, Williams College, and President of the Freud Foundation US
