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The Impossible Return – Psychoanalytic Reflections on Breast Cancer, Loss, and Mourning

Author(s) : Anna Fishzon

Reviews and Endorsements

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