The Embodied Analyst: Presence, Soma, Prosthesis addresses the body of the psychoanalyst and its role in treatment. Long neglected in the literature, the analyst’s body has received unprecedented attention since the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper intervenes in widely debated topics: What is lost and gained in remote treatment, and how does the living presence of the analyst inform therapeutic action? The psychoanalytic frame highlights the ways bodies and their drives speak silently. What happens when analysts’ bodies are entombed in portable devices, or when their very appearance discloses illness to patients? Can an analyst still function as a transference object or prosthesis for the patient following revelations about the analyst’s private corporeality? The function of the analyst’s real body is illustrated through short clinical vignettes, as well as the author’s personal story of cancer treatment and reconstructive surgery. The paper concludes with a discussion of body modification as Lacan’s sinthome—a productive binding of the drive to the specular and symbolic—in the aftermath of trauma.

Learning Objectives:

At the end of this presentation participants will be able to:

1. Participants will be able to explain the role of the analyst’s lived body in psychoanalytic treatment and evaluate how these dynamics shift in remote or technologically mediated analysis.
2. Participants gain understanding of the concept “prosthesis” and its relevance in the analytic encounter.
3. Participats will be able to key Lacanian concepts to contemporary clinical dilemmas around embodiment.

Anna Fishzon, PhD, FIPA

Anna Fishzon, PhD, FIPA is a licensed psychoanalyst in full-time private practice in New York City. She is Member, Supervisor, and Faculty at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR) and a training analyst and faculty member at Pulsion: The International Institute of Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychosomatics (New York). She is also an active Participant in the Après-Coup Psychoanalytic Association (New York). Dr. Fishzon has authored two books: The Impossible Return: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Breast Cancer, Loss, and Mourning (Routledge, 2025) and Fandom, Authenticity, and Opera: Mad Acts and Letter Scenes in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); she is co-editor with Emma Lieber of The Queerness of Childhood: Essays from the Other Side of the Looking Glass (Palgrave, 2023). For a decade she taught interdisciplinary courses at Williams College, Columbia University, and Duke University, and authored scholarly articles on Russian history, consumer culture, temporality, late socialism, animation, and opera.