Radical Return

Natalie Cohen's memoir of betrayal, both personal and professional, ends in transcendent freedom from both. Sentence after sentence, vignette after vignette, her story is powered by emotion as strong as the Hudson River, by tides that churn Atlantic Ocean water back and forth each day. The reader is placed at river's edge, privileged to witness Cohen's own mix of briny despair along with her embrace of the sweet waters of hope. We hear the consistent invocation to heal our minds in our bodies and our bodies in our minds. Cohen reaches to the reader and ever-graciously invites us to join her on this journey to inform and inspire. Radical Return stands on its own as an act of great courage to have undertaken.

In this brave and gorgeously rendered memoir, Natalie Cohen takes us on a profoundly sacred journey — one in which the body becomes both compass and oracle. With startling honesty and a poet's lyrical precision, she chronicles how she dared to dance in the flames while rising like a phoenix from the ashes. Memory becomes movement and pain reconfigures as possibility. Radical Return is pure alchemy — be prepared to be transformed.

Dr. Cohen is pioneering a new somatic, artistic approach to psychedelic integration that is at once brave, vulnerable, embodied, and revelatory. She is leading by example, forging a new way by living it first through her body. This provocative, beautiful book will leave you thinking and feeling differently. We all stand to benefit from the path she is dancing.

A rare insider's guide to two typically sequestered and enigmatic realms — psychoanalysis and psychedelics — showing, with striking persuasiveness, how powerful they can be as healing allies. Both hilarious and heartbreaking, the book opens a portal between dreaming and dance, sexual violation and bodily integrity. It is, ultimately, a love letter to feminine power in its many guises and transmutations amid abuses both insidious and overt. Accompanying Cohen on her intimate, revelatory journey, one cannot turn away without feeling an upsurge of fury, pain, and ethical resolve to confront patriarchy, misogyny, and their intersectional forces, while simultaneously cheering the heroic dimensions of one woman's quest to heal and reclaim her mind, body, and the sheer joy of being alive.

With scenes of coffee-fueled therapy sessions, plant medicine ceremonies, and dance born from both pain and joy, Natalie reimagines the future of psychoanalysis as an embodied, creative practice, inviting readers into a radical journey of healing through body, art, and altered states of consciousness. A genre-defying and edgy memoir, Radical Return speaks to clinicians, artists, and anyone drawn to the places where trauma, creativity, and healing intersect.

Natalie's remarkable work—cultivating curiosity, expanding awareness, owning creations, reimagining narratives, and manifesting intention—is impressive. Her story lives in the body as much as on the page, translating insight into movement, presence, and practice.

This book is a testament to one woman's journey to heal from within, to move the body in all its beauty. Witnessing Natalie's expansion and sharing it with the world is inspirational. We need more people like her to share their stories of healing and evolution.

Giving voice to the wisdom and mysteries of the body, in words and movement, is Dr. Natalie Cohen's gift to us. If you've ever wondered what your body has to tell you, read in Radical Return what her body has revealed to her — and you may sense something of what your body wants to reveal to you, too.

A soul-changing book by a remarkably intelligent woman, committed to finding out who she is and why. Natalie's mythic journey to wholeness kicks open the door, shedding sunlight on the very real benefits of plant medicine, and culminating in the restoration of true, ever-evolving being. Beautifully written by a quiet disruptor, the questioning force of the sacred feminine rising, and rooted in love, by love, for love.

Rich, beautiful, and elegant… Natalie's emotions are raw, her words pierce into your soul.

Natalie integrates feminism, psychedelics, spirituality, academic rigor, and the arts into her work as a psychologist, and in Radical Return, she blends her personal journey of exploration and inspiring career into a compelling, groundbreaking, and life-changing narrative.

Cohen's raw, candid, and moving narrative takes us through the worlds of dance, drugs, and psychoanalysis, and brings to light their transformative effects. A powerful and gripping reflection around the body, the psyche, and the complex interactions of the two.

In this invigorating, inspiring account of a human facing the paradoxical unknown, Cohen gracefully mirrors the rightful hesitation of so many in taking a strictly analytical psychological path, as she follows and integrates a fiercely feminine, emergent approach to "mental health." Courageous practitioners like Cohen, daring to forge new pathways instinctually and share openly without mincing words, are much needed right now.

In Natalie Cohen's Radical Return, we find exquisite attention to layering the internal with the external, the body and heart laced to the mind. In this visceral tale readers will find truth and healing in community.

Natalie's willingness to look within, to stay with what arises, and to translate that inner work into her writing is deeply inspiring. Radical Return — a profound gift to the world.

A truth-teller who weaves love, grief, curiosity, and humor into her visceral story of becoming, Natalie Cohen has written a fierce, feminist joyride of a book, charting the healing power of psychedelic medicine, the subtle intimacy between psychoanalyst and patient, the elation of reclaiming the body through movement and dance. Raw, courageous, and deeply embodied, this is one survivor's journey from silence to liberation. I raced through Radical Return with my heart in my throat.