Podcast Summary:

Podcast: New Books Network – New Books in Psychoanalysis
Episode: Anna Fishzon, "The Impossible Return: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Breast Cancer, Loss, and Mourning" (Routledge, 2025)
Date: January 20, 2026
Host: Chris (New Books Network)
Guest: Anna Fishzon

Overview of the Episode

This episode features psychoanalyst and author Anna Fishzon discussing her deeply personal and theoretically rich book, "The Impossible Return: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Breast Cancer, Loss, and Mourning." The conversation moves between Fishzon’s cancer experience, her analytic perspectives on the body and loss, mourning, shame, queer time, and the impossibility of returning to a pre-trauma or pre-loss self. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, personal narrative, literature, and opera, Fishzon reflects on the psychic impacts of illness, the fraught process of reconstruction, and the perpetual negotiation with absence and loss.

Main Discussion Points

Motivation Behind the Book

[02:15] Anna Fishzon explains the origins of her book:

• The book is prompted by Fishzon’s own breast cancer diagnosis and treatment in 2017.
• Initially, she resisted writing about her experience, finding the suggestion "crazy," but with time and distance, she saw an analytic and literary gap she could fill.
• Existing cancer literature emphasized treatments and survival but lacked a psychoanalytic meditation on anxiety, embodiment, mourning, and life after treatment.
• The book aims to address not just "the cancer journey" but the psychic work of living on in one’s altered body.

Quote ([03:22]):

"I was looking for literature from women who’d had similar experiences to mine ... I just couldn’t find something that I really connected to. And I thought maybe ... something is missing in this literature and I can write that book for myself, by myself."
— Anna Fishzon

Originals, Copies, and the Body: The Analytic and the Operatic

[06:00] Fishzon discusses her associations between original and copy, opera, and her surgical experience:

• The reconstructed breast as a copy of the original; this spurs reflections on loss, imitation, voice, and presence.
• Links Lacan’s objet a (“lost object”) to both the breast and the voice—both themes are woven through psychoanalytic theory and through Fishzon’s love of opera.

Quote ([08:10]):

"There are some parallels between psychoanalysis and opera that I draw ... the ethics of the body—you know, say whatever comes to mind is the imperative from the couch, and sing without constraint ... is the imperative of opera."
— Anna Fishzon

Being a Mother & The Uncanny of One-Breastedness

[09:11] The unique mourning of a breast, shaped by motherhood:

• The lost breast is not just erotic or aesthetic but bound to motherhood, nourishment, and love.
• The process of loss is likened to mourning a person—there are no rituals for this kind of grief.
• Observes how the "one-breasted woman is uncanny, frightening, shameful" in social and psychic life, evoking primal relation to the maternal.

Quote ([10:13]):

"To lose [the breast] is almost like losing a person and should be mourned like [a person] ... and there’s no ritual involved in mourning a breast or mourning a body part, for that matter ... it makes it more difficult to grapple with that loss."
— Anna Fishzon

The "Impossible Return"

[13:56] What does the title refer to?

• The "impossible return" is the fantasy of prelapsarian—or pre-trauma—wholeness.
• Surgical and psychic reconstruction both chase an unattainable state; psychoanalysis reveals this as a fundamental human condition—something is always already lost and cannot be fully restored.

Quote ([13:56]):

"Of course, you can reconstruct all you want ... but you can’t return. This speaks to the fundamental insight of psychoanalysis: that the object is always already lost ... there’s always something you can’t say or something you can’t get to."
— Anna Fishzon

The Hospital as Mother

[17:34] Ambivalence and Transference:

• The hospital is experienced as both a nurturing, containing mother (Winnicottian) and a phallic mother (all-powerful, lacking nothing).
• Patients are held, comforted, and contained in the timeless, regressive hospital environment, yet must abruptly re-enter indifferent "real life."

Quote ([17:34]):

"There’s a kind of idealization of the hospital ... they take away, and they give to you ... they hold you; you’re regressed because you’re ill."
— Anna Fishzon

The Analyst’s Body: Visibility, Disavowal, and the Room

[20:19] Fishzon details her own analytic practice post-surgery:

• Most of her patients either disavowed or could not register her bodily changes.
• Some who had similar surgical histories sensed more, but the norm was avoidance, protection, or ignorance—a testament to the psychoanalytic dynamics of not-knowing and not-seeing.

Quote ([21:02]):

"There did seem to be quite a disavow[al] ... a lot of them just completely denied [my absence or surgery] ... they either didn’t care or were too afraid to ask or imagined I was going on ... vacation ... so yeah, the relationship to the analyst’s body ... really varies."
— Anna Fishzon

Mourning, Shame, and the Limits of Recognition

[24:31] & [28:04] The psychoanalyst and the host discuss the psychic structure of shame and mourning:

• Chris reads a moving passage on mourning the breast, noting Fishzon’s beautiful evocation of the pain, loss, and "fallacy" underlying reconstruction.
• Mourning is not just individual but deeply entwined with shame—an affect that is both isolating and generated by the (real or imagined) gaze of others.

Quote ([28:04]):

"Shame is ... the subject. Lacan says this ... Shame results from the unconscious, essentially. It’s from that piece of oneself that is more than oneself or that is almost beside oneself ... So it feels like you just want to hide when it’s exposed. But it requires a viewer ... so it’s so private ... and yet it is a social affect."
— Anna Fishzon

Anxiety, Shame, and the "Lost Object"

[29:57] On the difference between sadness and anxiety, and the connection between shame and anxiety:

• Anxiety, unlike sadness, has no narrative; it is a raw, inassimilable affect, tied to the lost object, the abyss.
• Shame is structurally similar—fundamental, inescapable, social yet isolating.

Quote ([31:53]):

"Anxiety, there’s no story ... and maybe with shame, there’s no story either, really. It’s too fundamental to the subject."
— Anna Fishzon

Chernobyl, Radiation, and Collective Catastrophe

[33:07] Chernobyl emerges as a powerful metaphor and personal reference:

• Fishzon relates her fascination with Chernobyl to the omnipresent threat and reality of radiation in cancer treatment.
• Chernobyl also links to her birthplace (Kiev), family history, and the collective trauma and loss of place, safety, and identity.
• The concept of "perestroika" (reconstruction) connects geopolitical, psychic, and bodily repair—yet always with an impossibility or a failure at complete restoration.

Quote ([33:07]):

"For me, Chernobyl ... made the connection to my birthplace ... and it was also the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union ... So it gave me the opportunity to mourn ... a kind of lost world, a lost country that now doesn’t exist and my childhood, which ... changed forever."
— Anna Fishzon

Transgender Bodies and the Question of "Woman"

[38:16] On the "fantastic transgender body" and the instability of gendered categories:

• Fishzon draws from Lacan and the film "A Fantastic Woman" to ruminate on how transgender bodies unsettle normative gender categories and expose their constructedness.
• All bodies are already "in question," but trans bodies make this explicit; transitioning entails mourning for aspects of both the "old" and "new" body, even if there is no regret.
• "Woman," in psychoanalysis, is an impossible, fantastical category with no firm anchor.

Quote ([38:16]):

"There’s no defining characteristic of woman ... [the film] tries to get at this, you know, what is it that really bothers people about ... trans women in particular ... it throws into question ... all bodies."
— Anna Fishzon

Mourning What Cannot Be Known: The Surface and the Wound

[41:46] On psychic wounds and their unknowability:

• The wound of trauma resides "in the real," not merely in the visible or knowable body.
• Mourning entails letting go not only of lost objects but also of the fantasy that the wound can ever be fully healed.

Time, Queer Time, and Nonlinearity

[43:07] Explores "queer time" as psychic and cultural deviation from normativity:

• Linear time is associated with health, development, and normativity; disruptions in time (like those precipitated by trauma, illness, or queerness) unsettle identity and futurity.
• Queer time emerged in the context of queer theory (and especially as a response to the AIDS epidemic) to describe subjective and communal experiences outside normative temporalities.
• Psychoanalysis itself is full of nonlinearity: trauma, memory, transference.

Quote ([44:18]):

"All of these disruptive, atemporal or not atemporal, but just non-linear temporal moments are at the heart of queer culture and queerness ... so much in the psychoanalytic session is non-linear."
— Anna Fishzon

The Structure of the Book: Free Association and Return

[47:38] Fishzon’s closing reflections:

• The book is intentionally structured in a way that mimics the analytic process—free associative, non-linear, ever-circling, with themes returning and recombining.
• She pleads with readers to trust the process and not give up, as each "thread" will find its return.

Quote ([48:47]):

"It is free associative ... it mimics or is similar to an analytic hour or maybe an analysis ... sometimes it feels like, oh my God, and now she’s talking about this, why is she talking about that? But just to have some patience and understand ... it weaves together and not to give up on it."
— Anna Fishzon

Notable & Memorable Quotes With Timestamps

• "I was looking for literature from women who’d had similar experiences ... I just couldn’t find something that I really connected to. And I thought ... maybe I can write that book for myself." (03:22 — Anna Fishzon)
• "There are some parallels between psychoanalysis and opera ... say whatever comes to mind is the imperative from the couch, and sing without constraint ... is the imperative of opera." (08:10 — Anna Fishzon)
• "To lose [the breast] is almost like losing a person and should be mourned like [a person] ... there’s no ritual involved in mourning a breast or mourning a body part." (10:13 — Anna Fishzon)
• "The 'impossible return' ... the object is always already lost and there is no going back." (13:56 — Anna Fishzon)
• "There did seem to be quite a disavow[al] ... a lot of [patients] just completely denied [my absence or surgery] ... the relationship to the analyst’s body ... really varies." (21:02 — Anna Fishzon)
• "Shame is so private ... and yet it is a social affect. The other sees, doesn’t recognize or disapproves, or rejects, and then you’re left with your own alienation." (28:04 — Anna Fishzon)
• "Anxiety, there’s no story ... and maybe with shame, there’s no story either, really. It’s too fundamental to the subject." (31:53 — Anna Fishzon)
• "For me, Chernobyl ... made the connection to my birthplace ... it gave me the opportunity to mourn ... a lost world, a lost country that now doesn’t exist and my childhood, which changed forever." (33:07 — Anna Fishzon)
• "There’s no defining characteristic of woman ... it throws into question ... all bodies." (38:16 — Anna Fishzon)
• "Just to have some patience and understand ... it weaves together and not to give up on it." (48:47 — Anna Fishzon)

Key Timestamps

• 02:15 — Fishzon’s motivation to write the book
• 06:00 — Discussion of reconstruction, originals/copies, Lacan, and opera
• 09:11 — Motherhood, loss of the breast, and mourning
• 13:56 — The "impossible return" and psychoanalysis’ theory of loss
• 17:34 — The hospital as mother; ambivalence toward the institution
• 21:02 — The analyst's body and patient perception
• 28:04–31:53 — Mourning, shame, anxiety, and their psychoanalytic structure
• 33:07–36:29 — Chernobyl, collective trauma, radiation, and mourning lost worlds
• 38:16 — Transgender bodies and the destabilization of gendered categories
• 43:07–46:25 — Queer time, nonlinear temporality, and psychoanalysis
• 47:38 — Structure of the book as analytic process and closing thoughts

Conclusion: What Listeners Should Take Away

Fishzon’s "The Impossible Return" is a challenging, intricately structured meditation that moves between memoir, theory, and cultural analysis. It emphasizes:

• The impossibility of regaining lost innocence or wholeness;
• The persistent work of mourning and the impossibility of completing it;
• The psychic and social complexities of illness, body modification, and gender;
• The essential, but often unspoken, presence of shame, anxiety, and time disruption in illness;
• The importance of patience—both in reading her book and in the process of mourning, healing, and analysis.

Final Invitation ([48:47]):

"Just to have some patience and understand ... it does come together and it weaves together ... not to give up on it ... because it will return."
— Anna Fishzon