PULSE: Anna Fishzon, The Impossible Return

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. The author’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, The Impossible Returnmakes original contributions to psychoanalysis, Slavic and cultural studies, film criticism, and history.
Anna Fishzon, PhD, FIPA is a licensed psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. She is Member, Supervisor, and Faculty at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and a training analyst and faculty member at Pulsion. She is also an active Participant in the Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association. Dr. Fishzon has authored two books: The Impossible Return: Psychoanalytic Reflections onBreast Cancer, Loss, and Mourning (Routledge, 2025) and Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); she is co-editor with Emma Lieber of The Queerness of Childhood: Essays from the Other Side of the Looking Glass (Palgrave, 2023). For a decade she taught interdisciplinary courses at Williams College, Columbia University, and Duke University, and authored scholarly articles on Russian history, consumer culture, temporality, late socialism, animation, fashion, and opera.

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