Rendering Unconscious welcomes Dr. Anna Fishzon back to the podcast!
Rendering Unconscious episode 386.
In this episode, we discuss Anna’s new book, The Impossible Return: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Breast Cancer, Loss, and Mourning (Routledge, 2025), which explores personal and broader themes of loss, including the impact of cancer and bodily changes. Anna shares her experience of being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2017, and the subsequent treatments, surgeries, and reconstruction she underwent. The book integrates personal narrative with theoretical rigor, addressing topics ranging from bodily assault and aging to anxiety and hypochondria to radiation and Chernobyl to the Lacanian concept of the sinthome. We discuss the broader applicability of psychoanalytic thinking both personally and professionally, as well as more globally. Anna describes the challenges of writing and marketing such a book, and shares her thought about writing on melancholia next.
Anna Fishzon, PhD is a psychoanalyst in private practice and an interdisciplinary scholar in New York City. She has taught courses on Russian history, psychoanalysis, literature, and gender and sexuality at Williams College, Columbia University, and Duke University, USA. She is the author of The Impossible Return ~ Psychoanalytic Reflectons on Breast Cancer, Loss, and Mourning (2025) and Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (2013). She is co-editor (with Emma Lieber) of The Queerness of Childhood: Essays from the Other Side of the Looking Glass (2022), as well as many scholarly articles and book chapters. She is member, supervisor and faculty at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) in New York and Fellow of the International Psychoanalytic Association.
Check out previous episode(s) with this guest:
RU292: ANNA FISHZON & EMMA LIEBER ON THE QUEERNESS OF CHILDHOOD & REMEMBERING UNICORNS
