Release Date: October 6, 2026
Size: 6x9
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Booksellers and Libraries: Order Info Here or at Ingram.

Synopsis

Radical Return fuses personal storytelling with professional insight to explore the transformative potential of psychedelics. A memoir-in-essays tracing Natalie's experience healing from sexual violence, ancestral trauma, medical trauma, and institutional betrayal, this fearless reflection challenges the medicalized narrative of healing. Clinical psychologist Dr. Natalie R. Cohen recounts her recovery through guided journeys with ketamine, MDMA, psilocybin, and ayahuasca. But the real story unfolds after the medicine fades—through dance, ritual, tattooing, dreamwork, and psychoanalytic reckoning. Blending lived experience with clinical insight, Cohen centers a woman’s body as both witness and site of transformation.

Urgent, embodied, and culturally resonant, Radical Return offers a new blueprint for integration—one rooted not only in science, but in voice, movement, and a radical return to one’s whole self.

Praise

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

 —Ilaria Montagnani, founder & CEO of Powerstrike and producer of award-winning documentary Stronger for Life

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“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.”

—Diana Whitney, author of Girl Trouble

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“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. 

—Kylea Taylor, author of The Ethics of Caring

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“In this brave and gorgeously rendered memoir, 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.” 

—Karen Brailsford, author of Sacred Landscapes of the Soul: Aligning with the Divine Wherever You Are
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“In Radical Return, Natalie Cohen marries experience and clinical language in a way that makes the emotional process of healing from sexual trauma feel relatable and accessible.”

—Natalie Gergely, writer, producer, and co-host of Vertigals podcast, about the art of writing vertical micro dramas

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“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.”

—Camille Robcis, professor at Columbia University and author of Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France

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“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.”

—Jill Gentile, PhD, psychologist/psychoanalyst and author of Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, & the Voice of Desire

Meet the Author

Dr. Natalie R. Cohen is a psychologist, psychoanalyst, and psychedelic-assisted therapist in New York City whose work bridges trauma healing, embodiment, and creative expression. She holds postgraduate certifications in ketamine- and psilocybin-assisted therapy and MDMA training from MAPS. She lives with her partner, tween daughter, and their puppy. Radical Return is her first book.