Reading Room: Talks with Authors

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

(Routledge, 2025)

Anna Fishzon 

Friday, November 6, 2026 • 6:30 PM – 8:00 PM 

Through the author’s opening account of her own experience of breast cancer, mastectomy, and reconstruction, The Impossible Return offers a psychoanalytic meditation on other losses, unfinished mournings, and sublimations. Adopting the recursive structure of analysis, it explores how traumatic rupture may be transformed into prosthesis as both subtraction and appendage, crossing the animate and inanimate. Ultimately it examines the sinthome’s suturing of self and feeling in the breach of illness, and seeks new ways to think about impasse itself.

Location to be announced.

Fee: Attendance is free and open to the public. Registration details to follow.

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Anna Fishzon is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. She is a Member, Supervisor, and Faculty member at IPTAR and a Participant at Après-Coup. She is the author of Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (2013), and with Emma Lieber, co-edited The Queerness of Childhood: Essays from the Other Side of the Looking Glass (2023). She has published numerous scholarly articles on late socialism, temporality, consumer culture, animation, and Russian opera.