Publications

Anna Fishzon, PhD, LP, FIPA
Psychoanalyst

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

Routledge,
2025

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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.

Anna Fishzon’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 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, this book makes original contributions to psychoanalysis, Slavic and cultural studies, trauma studies, film criticism, and history. This unique work will be relevant to readers interested in psychoanalytic studies, cancer and disability studies and critical theory, and academics of autotheory and memoir.

Fandom, Authenticty And Opera, Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Siècle Russia

Palgrave Macmillan
2013,

Link

In Russia at the turn of the twentieth century, printed literature and performances - from celebrity narratives and opera fandom to revolutionary acts and political speeches - frequently articulated extreme emotional states and passionate belief. A uniquely intense approach to public life and private expression - the 'melodramatic imagination' - is at the center of this study. Previously, scholars have only indirectly addressed the everyday appropriation of melodramatic aesthetics in Russia, choosing to concentrate on canonical texts and producers of mass culture.

Collective fantasies and affects are daunting objects of study, difficult to render, and almost impossible to prove empirically. Music and art historians, with some notable exceptions, have been reluctant to discuss reception for similar reasons. By analyzing the artifacts and practices of a commercialized opera culture, author Anna Fishzon provides a solution to these challenges. Her focus on celebrity and fandom as features of the melodramatic imagination helps illuminate Russian modernity and provides the groundwork for comparative studies of fin-de-siècle European popular and high culture, selfhood, authenticity, and political theater.

The Queerness of Childhood: Essays from the Other Side of the Looking Glass

Palgrave Macmillan
2022

Link

This book represents a meeting of queer theorists and psychoanalysts around the figure of the child. Its intention is not only to interrogate the discursive work performed on, and by, the child in these fields, but also to provide a stage for examining how psychoanalysis and queer theory themselves interact, with the understanding that the meeting of these discourses is most generative around the queer time and sexualities of childhood. From the theoretical perspectives of queer theory, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and gender studies, the chapters explore cultural, aesthetic, and historical forms and phenomena that are aimed at, or are about, children, and that give expression to and make room for the queerness of childhood.

Articles

Refereed Articles

“The Place Where We [Want to] Live: East-West and Other Transitional Phenomena in Vladimir Vysotskii’s Alisa v strane chudes.” In Mark Lipovetsky and Klavdia Smola, eds., Russia – Culture of (Non-)Conformity: From the Late Soviet Time to the Present. A special issue of Russian Literature Journal 96-98
(February–May, 2018), 167-193.

“Queue Time as Queer Time: An Occasion for Pleasure and Desire in the Brezhnev Era and Today.” As part of the forum, “The Queue in Soviet and Post-Soviet Literature and Culture.” Slavic and East European Journal 61/3 (2017), 542-566.

“The Fog of Stagnation: Explorations of Time and Affect in Late Soviet Animation.” In Larissa Zakharova and Kristin Roth-Ey, eds., Communications and Media in the USSR and Eastern Europe: Technologies, Politics, Cultures, Social Practices. A special issue of Cahiers du Monde Russe 56/2-3 (2015), 571-598.

“Confessions of a Psikhopatka: Opera Fandom and the Melodramatic Sensibility in Fin-de-Siècle Russia,” Russian Review 71 (January 2012), 100-121.

“The Operatics of Everyday Life, or, How Authenticity was Defined in Late Imperial Russia,” Slavic Review 70/4 (Winter 2011), 795-818.

Review Articles

“When Music Makes History.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 14/2 (Spring 2013), 381-394.

Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters

“The Queer Legacies of Late Socialism, or, What Cheburashka and Gary Shteyngart Have in Common.” In Olga Voronina, ed., Brill Companion to Soviet Children's Literature and Film (Brill, 2019).

“How Brezhnev-Era Films Queered Stagnation.” In Julie Buckler, Julie Cassiday, and Boris Wolfson, eds., Russian Performances and Their Intellectual Genealogies (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018).

Book Reviews

Review of Frances H. Moore, Growing Through the Erotic Transference: An Analysand’s Journey (Routledge, 2023) in Psychoanalytic Psychology 41/3 (Jul 2023).

Review of Lilya Kaganovsky and Masha Salazkina, eds., Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014) in Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research
8/3 (2016), 146-150.

Review of Colleen McQuillen, The Modernist Masquerade: Stylizing Life, Literature, and Costumes in Russia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013) in Cahiers du Monde Russe 56/4 (2016), 824-828.