← New Books Network
New Books Network
Anna Fishzon, "The Impossible Return - Psychoanalytic Reflections on Breast Cancer, Loss, and Mourning" (Routledge, 2025)
00:51:43
Loading summary
Transcript59 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast, or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
Welcome back to New Books and Psychoanalysis, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. Our guest for the episode is Anna Fishson. Anna Fishson is an analyst in private practice in New York City and also one of the original hosts on the New Books and Psychoanalysis Network. But today she joins us from the Other side as the author of the Impossible Psychoanalytic Reflections on Breast Cancer, Loss and Mourning, published 2025 by Outledge ANA. Welcome to the Other side.
- [01:42]
C
Thanks, Chris. It's great to be with you.
- [01:45]
B
Yeah, well, we've been talking about this for a while. I've been living with the book for a while, and as we just mentioned briefly before coming on here, this channel was founded by our mutual friend and colleague, Tracy Morgan. And honoring her, we will start with her question that she begins every interview with. And we do here, too. This is a psychoanalytic podcast, as far as we can know our own motivations. What motivated you to write the book?
- [02:16]
C
Oh, wow, okay. Let's see. I should have anticipated this one, but it's a very personal book. As is probably clear from very early in the book, I came from cancer diagnosis and treatment that I underwent in 2017, but I had no intention of writing about the experience when it first happened. And people started to say this to me pretty early, they're like, why don't you write about it? Right. Because they know that I write. And. And I thought, are they crazy? You know, like, so I'm just trying to get through the day, you know. But a year passed, and the. Some of the surgeries connected to the cosmetic aspect were not. The reconstruction, as they call it, were not yet finished. But I already started to think that I had enough distance. And really what motivated me initially was the. Was that I couldn't. I was looking for literature from women who had had similar experiences or by women who had had similar experiences to mine. But, you know, I just couldn't find something that was. That I really connected to. And I thought maybe, you know, some. Something is missing in this literature and I can. I can do this. I can write that book for myself, by myself. And I guess what was. What I thought might be lacking was a kind of analytic perspective on not only having cancer and experiencing that sort of, you know, anxiety associated with it, but maybe meditation on the anxiety itself and the nature of anxiety, the nature of, you know, the anniversaries that come up and how. How that affects the body. So how one navigates this from, again, from a psychoanalytic perspective and also more emphasis on maybe the reconstruction and the healing and the mourning part of it, rather than the treatment itself. Because there are a lot of books about sort of the cancer journey involving like chemo treatments or radiation therapy and all kinds of things which are very important. And. But for me, it was. It was just, how do you go on and. And live afterwards in your body? And how do you assimilate the experience, sublimate it more, et cetera.
- [04:56]
A
Yeah.
- [04:56]
B
What's interesting, you say that, you know, you went to the literature to find this statement, and it's been different authors on this podcast, the statement made by women. Oh, I went to the analytic literature to find. And the dearth of literature on women on things that is. Keeps coming up as almost shocking. All right, so you write the book for yourself, but of course, when you write for yourself, you're writing for us as well. Yeah. And so I want to start then with. And you make some associations and if you could take us through them, because it's also going to get in. This is my backdooring into our shared love. You make an association to low fidelity recordings of Caruso opera and the body of the analyst. What's that connection? That's my way of getting the opera and. Right at the top.
- [06:01]
C
Yes, absolutely. Anything I write seems to always go to opera ineluctably. It just has this way of ending up. It ends up as an excuse to talk about opera. But more seriously, I first made the connection through recordings and copies because. Well, this is specific to my experience with cancer and with. I chose to reconstruct. I had a unilateral mastectomy. And so there was a lot of emphasis on, you know, making the reconstructed breast look like the original. So this brings up originals and copies. And my mind immediately goes to. Because I've written on this before, not just because I'm just totally weird, but it goes to recording and voice. And the recording of a voice, which is specifically a voice being what Lacan calls one of the obje. Ah, one of the lost objects, as is the breast. So there's this connection again in my mind, in my associations. And also, music is a way of. This is my particular form of sublimation and my particular preoccupation. But opera specifically is, know. Is one of my great loves. And so it definitely played a role in some of the healing that had to take place. It was a combination of. And I'm also a collector where I used to be. I'm trying to curb that now of musical recordings and especially opera recordings.
- [07:43]
B
Well, we'll stay with opera, then.
- [07:45]
C
That's the immediate thing that I have to say on that.
- [07:47]
B
Yeah. Well, and also, I think what is sort of, I think widely known, but maybe not, at least at the Met in New York, that when you're in the Met listening to opera, it's just the voice. There's no microphone, no amplification. It's just the voice, it's just the bodies, which I think is pretty spectacular.
- [08:11]
C
I should say, too, just to add, since you bring up just live singing, first of all, there can't be live singing without the advent of recording technology. Right. And also, this kind of idea of the voice freed from the microphone is, again, a kind of apricot construction, as it were. But I do draw some parallels, particularly toward the end of the book. Some people told me I should have put this at the beginning, but, hey, I think the book kind of is structured in a free, associative manner. But at any rate that there's some. There are some parallels between psychoanalysis and opera that I draw, and that's one of them. The kind of ethics of the body, you know, say whatever comes to mind, you know, is the imperative from the couch. And sing without constraint, without. Without any kind of interference from microphone tech or from technology is the imperative of opera.
- [09:11]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's I'm in a tie together sort of a lot of sections into hopefully. One question here. Can you talk about. You write about being a mother as an influence on this book. The mother you are the breast. Breast as singular and doubling in dreams, a defense against castration. You write, the baby starts with a minus. It knows only the breast. It is 1, not 2. The object is always singular, always misrecognized. Then you write, the one breasted woman is uncanny, frightening, shameful, for she is the mother, baby, the repressed relation that shadows and dislocates subjecthood. What was all of that together? What was the influence being a mother on the book?
- [10:07]
C
Wow.
- [10:10]
B
I know I tied a lot together, but it seemed all related.
- [10:14]
C
Well, I think it added value and it added memory and a kind of relationship to the breast. So there was the erotic component, of course, but it's also this part that nourished my son, my baby, when he was a baby. So you form this very loving relationship to it. And it's. To lose it is almost like losing. It feels like losing a person and should be mourned. Like. And, you know, there's a way in which you, you know, like when. I don't know, often when you lose somebody, you love you, it comes in waves, right? Like you kind of. You draw away. You know, Freud talks about this in mourning and melancholia. You revisit it. You realize that the object is in fact gone forever. And you kind of again, assimilate a little piece of that information and then let it go. Then it comes again. And this is what I experienced with my breast, actually. And I think that. And the maternal relation that, that it kind of signifies that it's. That I would have to let go of in a sense. And there's no, of course, there's no ritual involved in mourning a breast or mourning a body part, for that matter, of any kind. So people, amputees of all kinds, right, or mourning one's, the ravages of aging or any kind of violence to the body. So, yeah, there's the sort of pre surgical breast that gave. It didn't only receive pleasure, it also gave sustenance. It makes it more difficult to grapple with that loss. But what's interesting in that particular passage that you read, I think I was trying to actually grapple with why. Why it's so uncanny, this sort of one breastedness and why more people didn't take up Audre Lorde's call to just go one breasted. And of course, people do who have unilateral. Or they go flat. If they have, you know, a double mastectomy there, people choose to do that as well. And people get top surgery, et cetera. So. But what is it about this one breasted. And it was very difficult for me to. To move on in this way. And I thought about, you know. Yeah. Why it's eerie to see it. It's because it really does kind of almost evoke this. At least it did for me. This. The relation with. With the infant where the infant doesn't. Never gets the two together. Right. So. So probably imagines the breast and then there's something really that has to happen later in development where you assimilate the whole object and then you can really. And the whole specular object and see the body as less fragmented and the mother as, you know, or the parent as their own subject. But that's like. There's a gap there and the stuff gets repressed. Really returns when you see yourself as one breasted, I think.
- [13:46]
B
Yes. So then what is the. To go back to the title of the book, what is the impossible return?
- [13:56]
C
A kind of prelapsarian wholeness. There's this again to tie it to cancer discourses and reconstruction discourses. There's a lot about making yourself whole again is one of those basically imperatives or tropes that circulates. You reconstruct to reacquire a kind of wholeness. Right. But of course, you can reconstruct all you want and go back for all kinds of corrective surgeries, but, you know, you can't return. But this. This speaks to the fundamental insight of psychoanalysis that there's a kind of. The object is always already lost and that there is no, you know, we're all. We're all riven. Right. Because of the unconscious, as there's always an inaccessible part. There's always something you can't say or something you can't get to and. And you like with mortality, you can't know your own birth, you can't know your own death. You know, and this. This. This is what frustrates us. I know. Thank God. Well, it makes us very uncomfortable.
- [15:07]
B
Yeah.
- [15:08]
C
And there's an uneasiness that. That sh. That shoots through even our most happy, you know, our happiest moments, I would argue. So that's why people come to analysis, you know, help me get rid of this feeling. And you can't fully get rid of it.
- [15:25]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Help me not to be me. And you're like, well, that bad news which you will discover in about 20 years.
- [15:37]
C
Oh boy. Yeah.
- [15:38]
B
Yeah.
- [15:38]
C
Hey, it's Brooklyn Adams and I'm partnering with Abercrombie to tell you about the newest drop from their active brand. Your personal best YPB leggings are made with buttery soft fabrics that hug you in all the right places and come in Abercrombie's viral curve love fit designed to eliminate waste gap paired with sports bras and super soft sweatshirts. It's activewear that supports every part of my busy lifestyle and gives me my best butt ever. Head into the new year feeling your personal best shop Active by Abercrombie in the app online and in stores.
- [16:09]
B
So I just want to, I want to swing out to sort of the some of the story with the hospital and then I'm going to come back to shame and mourning because that's, you know, if you put the word return and mourning in the title of a book, you are grounding it in very powerful psychoanalytic papers. But you talking about reconstruction a couple of times here. There's one point in the hospital where you're asking some pretty engaged questions. It's almost as if you are asking the surgeon to be, to think with you and the surgeon says something with like, oh, it's easy peasy, just Google it. Like this, just like this dismissal of what's happening here. And it may be routine, maybe a routine surgery and maybe your, maybe your surgery reconstruction number 10 for that day. I don't know how many patients I see in a day, but it's really jarring. But it was really jarring to read. And you write well, I love the fact that you call it famous cancer hospital. We don't get to know what hospital it is in the book, but you write that it is both. The hospital is both the sensual abundant mother and the phallic mother. How's it both?
- [17:34]
C
Well, the phallic mother has everything right and it just so it's, there's a kind of idealization of the hospital that transference to the hospital that forms and they take away and they give to you. They took my breast away. They take away the cancer they take away. They cut. But they give you all kinds of. They give you hope, they reconstruct, they tell you you're doing well when you're doing well. They do a lot to affirm and reaffirm and so it just feels that they're holding you, you're regressed because you're ill. There's a sense in the hospital of time standing still, which is really Comforting when you're very aware of the clock and you're very aware of that your time on this earth might be limited, et cetera. So it elongates time. And so I guess I associate that. I associate to a kind of maternal preoccupation that Winnicott, you know, talks about, and a kind. And a holding that Winnicott. I'm thinking of Winnicott here, mostly. Yeah. In terms of the abundance, at least, and the sense that, you know, you just sort of have to let. Surrender to this. Otherwise you'll go mad trying to deal with the illness and the loss and then what happens? And I also write about this, is that. And again, I was looking for literature on this. I want to know how it's hard to let go of the hospital once you're deemed cured or in remission or whatever it is. You never completely let go. You have to come back for checkups. You know, they're forever kind of responsible for. Or you couldn't go to a different hospital, I suppose. But you see what I'm saying? You do have to return. But there's a way in which they care for you at the beginning that feels like very containing. And to go back to regular time, you're like, I'm not ready to step back into the real world where people don't give a shit that you just had cancer. And. Or they forget very, very quickly. And. And so. And you have to navigate sexuality, you have to navigate career, you have to navigate whoever. Your kids, if you have kids. So, yeah, you want to stay there a little longer. But it. But it's. It's just a kind of secondary gain, you could call it, you know, in psychopath. Yeah.
- [20:20]
B
So this idea of people forget that you had surgery. And I guess what I want to ask is. And I'm thinking about a colleague who wrote a paper called don't yout See I'm Pregnant. And she went very, very far, showing and worked maybe through eight months, I don't remember how long, but visibly pregnant. And the patients who just didn't see it. What did your patients know? Did they allow themselves to know? Did they know and forget what was your patient's relationship to your body? Because I think that that's. I think you address that in the book and it's never talked about.
- [21:03]
C
Yes. And I think that there did seem to be quite a disavow I didn't have. I wasn't in practice at the time, full time, the way I am now. I think it would be, you know, more difficult to manage just because of the sheer number of hours I work now. Right. But, but at the time I was in training and I was still in a clinic, so there's this kind of. I felt a little bit more protected in a way. I can't really explain what I mean by that. Maybe, but, but, but at, at any rate, I would, I had to take time off because I was having surgery and I had to recover and I didn't, you know, I wasn't sure how long I was going to be out, but I was told like probably you'll only need two weeks, but you should really take three. You know, this and that. And I was like, well what if I need more? God forbid, you know. And I, I consulted some supervisors, well, one in particular, Richard Lasky, who'd written on illness and the analyst. Anyway, he suggested to me that I just, I give them, I set a date that I'd be back and if I have to change the date, I have to change the D date. But it's really important to set a date so that people don't feel like they've been kind of dropped. So they know that you've thought this through and that you will indeed come back. I mean, that was the logic anyway, so I did that. But as soon as I announced this three week window, there are a number of people who had themselves had surgery who knew what was up. They just sort of sensed it that I was going to have. But a lot of them weren't just completely denied, you know, they either didn't care or were too afraid to ask or imagine that I was going on some kind of really fantastic vacation. And even when there were point, you know, there were, there was evidence to the contrary, they just couldn't really assimilate that. They either disavowed it or scotomized, you know, the. Whatever they saw or whatever it was. So yeah, the relationship to the analyst's body is. I think, you know, I am behind the couch. I'm not really visible for to most patients some sit up, but most don't. And, but even when they do sit up, they don't always see. So it's interesting. It really, I would say that it's the singularity of each case. It really varies. But I have heard what you mentioned, your colleague who wrote this book, I've heard this before, that when, when people are pregnant and they. Nobody notices, you know, until they announce it at like eight months or something. Yeah, this, this happens. It doesn't happen in every case, obviously, but what I mean I don't know. What do you think that's about? Do you have ideas?
- [24:00]
B
Well, sure. I mean, the. The intense power of not knowing, not seeing what is. I have an example in mind, but I haven't prepared it, so I can't disguise it for confidentiality of real, powerful not knowing. That's. That's happening. I can't go into that.
- [24:26]
C
I mean, yes, the passion for ignorance. Yeah, yeah.
- [24:32]
B
Yeah. Okay, let's. Of course, mourning is central to psychoanalysis. You mentioned morning and melancholia. I want to read. I'm going to read a passage to get us into mourning because it is some of the most beautiful, evocative writing I've encountered in a very long time. So bear with me. I'm going to read this, and then we'll get into some questions. Here. This is in a chapter called A Dialogue on Loss. You write, please forgive me. Try to understand me. I cry for my right breast, which has not returned in silicone form, and for the psychic breast, my first object, which was once my mother's and part of me always and eternally lost. I mourn it. When I mourn my amputated breast. The prosthesis does nothing to tranquilize the pain or quell the sadness. If only I had had the strength, the moxie, as you say, to go one breasted, I would not have put up with the constant sensation of a foreign object in my body. But the other's gaze that views one breasted as bizarre is incorporated. When I look in the mirror, I see myself from an external third position in my mind's eye. I am an object. I gaze upon myself looking at myself walking on the street, among others. And now I imagine something not whole, not that will never be whole, though it never was. Instead of my beautiful, supple, indolent breast, I see a rigid and perky breast monk. I cannot agree that those who reconstruct fool themselves. Women are not gullible. We know that reconstruction is at root the fallacy, a misogyny even. And yet we go ahead and we survive. I mean, that passage just floored me. That's one of the things where I read and I had to stand up and walk around the room and come back to it. Really astonishing. So let's talk about mourning. And you mentioned mourning and melancholia. And so I'm a little bit from morning and melancholia. Freud writes feelings of shame in front of other people, which would more than anything characterize the latter condition. Mourning are lacking in the melancholic or at least they're not prominent in him. One might emphasize the presence in him of an almost opposite trait, of insistent communicativeness, which finds satisfaction in self exposure. So the shame is exposed over and over again. And you write, shame is occasioned by a disruption in an identity constituting in an identity constituting circuit of recognition. The cardinal paradox of shame as both isolation and acutely social. So what is this disruption in the circuit of recognition? And how is shame isolating and acutely social?
- [28:05]
C
Well, I think so. The initial quote was from Morning and Melancholia.
- [28:10]
B
Yes.
- [28:12]
C
Yeah. Okay. So shame is the subject. Lacan says this. You know, Eve Sedgwick sort of says this, or she talks about the disruption in the. It's actually Eve Sedgwick's idea in the circuit of recognition. So I think, you know, shame results from the unconscious, essentially. It's from that piece of oneself that is more than oneself or that is almost beside oneself that one can control, but it's still part of the self. And so sometimes it does things and you're like, oh, that's me, but it isn't me, but I have no control over it. And it spills out and embarrasses itself and does what it does. So it feels like you just want to hide when it. When it's exposed. But it requires a viewer or. Yeah, it requires the other with a small O. So it's social. So it's so private. You know, it's so excruciatingly about the self. Shame. It is self itself, and yet it requires. It is a social affect. So the other sees. And then there's. I think. But doesn't. Can't assimilate whatever it is that you're putting out there. So there's the other. Cs, doesn't recognize or disapproves or rejects. And then you're left with this. With your own alien nation. I would say.
- [29:50]
B
Yeah. Which is inescapable.
- [29:52]
C
Right.
- [29:53]
B
I think that's what's so crippling about shame. There's no. There's no resolution.
- [29:58]
C
Right. But I think I was. Yeah. And I was trying to account for. In the context of that chapter. There's one chapter that's mostly about anxiety, but it's also quite a bit about shame, because one of the principal affects, you know, when you. When you have cancer and when you're diagnosed and you go through all this stuff. My God, are you in touch with. With your anxiety? All forms of anxiety. So I knew that if, you know, if I was going to write about this, I would have to write a chapter on anxiety. And then I thought about how close shame is to anxiety, how similar they are actually structurally. Because, you know, it's. Even though with shame there is. It's so fundamental because it's about the subject, and so is anxiety. You know, Lacan famously said it's the one affect that doesn't deceive. It does. It's not symbolized. It just is. You know, you're anxious. You're not anxious about anything really. It has. Well, it has an object. It has no object, but the object is the object. It is the lost object. It is the thing that is missing. It's. It's the abyss. So as that, you know, as you near the. The abyss, you feel the anxiety, and it will never. It will never lie to you. Tears may lie to you. Other affects may. May deceive, but not anxiety. Meaning. They run through a circuit of. Of. Of meaning. You know, you have to get to the bottom of that. Like, you're sad. What. What's the matter? What are you sad about? What kind of stories are you telling yourself in this sadness? You know, so whereas anxiety, there's no, there's no story. And maybe with shame, there's no story either, really. It's too fundamental to the. To the subject.
- [31:54]
B
That's the right word for fundamental. And there is no story.
- [31:58]
C
So it's, you know, it's interesting because when you, like, for example, with music, when I'm sad and I listen, you know, and I really listen to opera, say I can really access various emotions through the music, or it, It. It helps me access them or I elaborate them in the music. And when you're anxious, music is. It just scrambles you. It. It. It doesn't. It doesn't really quell the anxiety or transform it. It's very difficult kind of affect in that way.
- [32:30]
B
So then staying with. Staying with mourning and coming back into the book, you talk about. The repeated request for truth and knowledge are also attempts at mourning. So maybe it's the request for a story. They are ritualized, sacred and interminable. But to mourn that which is hidden and unseen is a laborious task. And that gets us into Chernobyl. So can you talk about how Chernobyl shows up in this book?
- [33:07]
C
Yeah, so I. This is complicated. Actually. When I was writing the book, I became. I happened to see a documentary on Chernobyl, and I was really struck by this one character in the documentary or the person who. An interviewee who would be in charge. He was in charge of the exclusion zones. There's a zone around the reactor that had melted down. And, you know, he talked about the fascination with the zone and with the reactor itself and the sarcophagus that was built around it and how people. And he went there many times and penetrated it illegally to find out what was on the inside. So it deals with this idea of a return, of a repetition, and the difficulty in mourning of letting go of this event. But also. So that's. And then at some point, I thought, why am I so interested in watching this guy? And what is it? He's really speaking to something, in my experience. But also, I was fascinated. All of us, you know, not surprisingly, maybe I never had radiation, but a lot of people I know with cancer did. And, you know, this. I was fascinated by radiation as both the cure and cause of cancer or, you know, a treatment for and cause. And so. And it being kind of silent and deadly and coping with it. And so, yeah, for me, it was. It. It also tied. It also made the connection. The Chernobyl makes the connection to my. My birthplace, which was Ukraine, Kiev specifically. And Chernobyl is very close to Kyiv. And I had already. My family had many. Not my whole family, but many of my family had already immigrated, but I definitely had people left there who were very much affected by Chernobyl. It was also the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, as far as as I'm concerned. So it gave me the opportunity to mourn again. Again, maybe the process is never completed, but a kind of lost world, a lost country that now doesn't exist in my childhood, which never really sort of the trajectory of which changed forever, obviously, with the immigration to the United States. So it does a lot of work. In other words, this Chernobyl reference, there are two chapters that are. One specifically on the sarcophagus, which is, again, the sort of house of the reactor. And again, I connect it to reconstruction, breast reconstruction, and this kind of signifier that floats up. And then perestroika, which literally means reconstruction. So these efforts after Chernobyl at covering it up, at transforming it into something productive, at reconstructing and. And the failures of that, actually, because the Soviet Union couldn't be reconstructed.
- [36:30]
B
Well, what's so interesting, the association I made. First of all, I did not know that perestroika literally means reconstruction. I did not know that. But very late in the book to come back, you have a quote from Tony Kushner, and the quote is, opera makes appalling demands. And, you know, the second Part of Angels in America is called Perestroika. He talks about. He gives one of the main characters a monologue where she imagines all of the dead souls from. They call it the plague from aids. All of the dead souls floating up into the troposphere. Tropopause, I can't remember. But basically, they all come and reconstruct and repair the ozone. It's one of those beautiful pieces of writing in the theater. But Kushner saying, opera makes appalling demands. I thought, yes, that is psychoanalysis. It really does. You mentioned a moment back here in the interview when we're talking about to breast and reconstruction, but you also mentioned pop surgery. And early in the book, you write about transgender bodies. You say, the fantastic transgender body throws all other bodies into question. Woman does not exist. She is necessarily fantastic. And then you're right, there are only women. Talk about the transgender body, woman not existing, and woman being necessarily fantastic. Because I thought that that movement between the two, I think, is extremely important.
- [38:16]
C
I'm referencing, again, some of Lacan's ideas about woman being the other of woman with a capital W, being the other of man and being kind of this fantasy of wholeness, but also that there's, you know, the feminine and the mysteries of the feminine, and it being, again, fantastical, a phantasm, right? Something that anchors, quote, man, but is not represented in the unconscious because there's no other. You know, woman is the other of man, but there's no other of woman. There's nothing to anchor woman in a set, if that makes sense. So. So there's no defining characteristic of woman. And I think what I was trying to say in that particular, I was talking about a film, a fantastic woman, about a transgender opera singer and her. Her efforts to mourn her lover and the difficulties in mourning. So it does tie. The film, ties certain themes together, obviously, in the book. But I think, for me, I was also trying to. And the film tries to get at this, you know, what is it that really bothers people about, you know, why do trans women in particular get attacked so much? And, you know, what. What is it that really gets under people's skin? And it's because it throws into question, you know, it doesn't really throw into question. They're already in question, all bodies. But. But it really makes things kind of explicit. These questions of the body that matters are never settled with the body. And so I also was fascinated by, again, in this film, this idea that. Or at least how I read the film, that this woman, this trans woman, had to. That there was. She had to mourn her other body or had to mourn something that related to the body and her efforts. So she wasn't only mourning her lover who died suddenly. She was mourning a lot. She was mourning a certain kind of. Maybe even a certain kind of femininity that she chose, she wanted to embody. When she first transitioned, something didn't quite. Wasn't quite working for her. And again. And as an analyst, you know, when I think about, you know, I think about people who transition and it. It alerted me to the idea that they really. It's really important to mourn the body, even when it's not the body you wanted. Because you're still losing something, even if what you're. It doesn't mean you regret it. Because I think people can say, well, you're. You're sort of intimating that. No, I'm actually, you can. You can not regret it, but you make a choice, you always lose something, right? And so you might not regret the choice. And yet it's important to mourn, to let go of. Of whatever fantasies, ideals, hopes associated with. With that. With that imago, you know, with that initial imago.
- [41:35]
B
And then the question you ask in the book around that is, how can I mourn the surface of my former body when the fissure is in the real, right?
- [41:46]
C
I mean, the wound is in the real of the body, but we can. Only the body that we quote, have is the surface. Most of the time when people reference, they say my body, you know, they're talking about the body that they. The specular image, the body, you know, the body, ego. But the, but really the wound, you know, is something that. It's the pound of flesh. It's something that is. That exceeds this. This image. And it can't. It can't ever be fully repaired, you know, but maybe what one mourns, really then is this kind of ideal or the very idea that one can suture that wound, right? So mourning the impossible return, mourning the idea of mourning fully, this paradoxical, or.
- [42:42]
B
The wound cannot be sutured. You write a lot about time shifts and you have an interest in queer time. You write, I noticed suddenly I'm older than my mother. What is queer identity rooted in aberrant relations to time?
- [43:07]
C
It's complicated. And I tried, I think, you know, this idea of linear time, it's so tied to health, like good development, you know, steady development and normativity. But also time enables chronological time, diachronic. The diachronic enables one to kind of move on, seek the new repair. Imagine if it enables futurity and any disruption in this kind of, you know, queers, you in a sense. So that's one way of viewing it. But you know, it's not, I think as far as I understand it, you know, unless there's some literature that I haven't delved into that exists out there. The concept of queer time was first associated with or grew out of, you know, queer theory and the idea that there's something like maybe that queer, gay.
- [44:17]
B
Or.
- [44:19]
C
Non heterosexual, non normative people that somehow they've, they're out of time or there's something that they're, they're stunted or so first that. But also the AIDS epidemic and the shrinking future of, of gay men at that time and the horizon of possibility, what was it? And so there was a kind of sense that people were playing with time and creating pockets of, of duration that were stretched and that were. Whether it was in a club or you know, and also in queer spaces, whether it was through taking drugs or through partying or through just sort of poly relationships, you know, anything to disrupt gender, to disrupt that disrupts. Or actually when you disrupt time, you disrupt gender. You could argue, right. Or is it the other way around? But at any rate, all of these disruptive, atemporal or not atemporal, but just non linear temporal moments that construct that or that are at the heart of queer culture and queerness. Of course also this, I immediately link this to or yeah to psychoanalysis that even though it kind of. I mean certainly there are occurrence within psychoanalysis that trumpet, you know, we want futurity, we of course want linear time. We want to restore this in the psychotic or in the borderline or whatever. People, you know, I don't know if they proclaim this really, but this is the implicit message. However, there's so much in this, in the psychoanalytic session that is non linear, I mean. Right. And in Freud being the central concept, the time of trauma, the time of the analytic hour, interpretation and the way that it can work. And you mentioned earlier that you like Laplanche, he's an expert on that.
- [46:25]
B
Well, so now I can say something as we're coming to near the end of time, something that was very pleasing to me when I formed a group and it was all their first time together and they, Somebody, you know, at one point asked for a time check. I think like most people, they wanted to start in but didn't have much time. And the group conscience to steal a 12 step word. The group said, no, no, no, no, no. We never want to know what time it is. And they don't. They. So the group runs without watch or phone checks. They decided they wanted group to that the cut, you know, as we are cutting, you know, that's our time that they don't want to know when it's coming. They chose that, which I was really pleased with. So we're at the end of our time. But what would you like the listeners to know about the book that we haven't covered? The challenge with these interviews is we only get to dive into different chapters. What should people take away from this when they're thinking about your book?
- [47:39]
C
I think that the book can be a bit challenging. I don't know what your experience was like reading it. If I were going to interview you, then we had another hour. I'd probably ask. But I think, you know, it can. It. I introduce it's. It is free, associative and in some ways it, it mimics or is similar to an analytic hour or maybe an analysis, you know, and it, it ran. The writing of it ran sort of almost parallel to my own analysis. And so, and so I guess there, there are themes that are introduced and there are. You know, sometimes it feels like, oh, my God, and now she's talking about this, and why is she talking about that? But just to have some patience and understand like you do in an analysis or in an analytic hour, that it does come together and it weaves together and not to, not to give up on it, you know, or to. Or to think that just because I've moved on from one topic that it won't come back because it won't return.
- [48:48]
B
It'll return.
- [48:49]
C
It'll return.
- [48:50]
B
It'll return. It won't be impossible.
- [48:53]
C
I guess that's just my way of. Yeah. My. My plea to the reader, perhaps. Yeah.
- [48:58]
B
Good, good. All right. We've been talking with Anna Fersand about her latest book, the Impossible Return, Psychoanalytic Reflections on Breast Cancer, Loss and Mourning, published by Routledge in 2025. Ana, thanks for joining.
- [49:15]
C
Thank you so much for having me, Chris. It was a pleasure.
- [49:31]
A
It's time to hit reset. Not the snooze button, reset the crank it up, start fresh, go big. Reset. Dave's Killer Bread believes grand greatness starts with killer taste, killer nutrition. And now a shot to rock your reset for real. Kick off the new year with an epic sweepstakes. Enter for a chance to win VIP concert, prize packs with round trip airfare, luxury hotel stay and much more so. Reset your routine, reset your own soundtrack, reset your expectations. Enter and see full rules for the Rocky reset sweepstakes@daveskillerbread.com reset.