The revelation of being HIV positive continues to be a discourse
fraught with meaning. In Infecting the Treatment: Being an
HIV-Positive Analyst, Gilbert Cole offers an intimate and deeply
insightful examination of disclosure of his HIV seropositivity on
his analytic sense of self and on his clinical work with
patients.
Cole begins his journey of discovery by meditating on the meanings
that being HIV positive have had for him, and by situating these
personal meanings within the multiple meanings of HIV
seropositivity generated by our culture, leading to a clinical
discussion of the pros and cons of disclosure to one's patients.
What begins as a consideration of disclosure of an ostensibly
medical fact, opens to an exploration of the broader problematic of
disclosure in the context of questions of sameness and difference,
of dependence and autonomy, and of the ethical ground of
psychoanalytic practice. He illuminates these issues by circling
back to his own predicament, which took the form of an apparent
conflict between his self-image as a psychoanalytic therapist
committed to a psychoanalytic treatment approach and aspects of his
self-experience that seemed uncomfortably dissonant with this
identity and this commitment. He approached resolution of this
conflict when he became able to use his HIV seropositivity as a
metaphor for aspects of the treatment process.
Comprising Cole's personal engagement of the issues inherent in
being an HIV-positive analyst, his report of clinical work
attendant to disclosure of his condition, and a research project
compiling the experiences of other HIV-positive analysts, Infecting
the Treatment is an intimate and deeply insightful examination of
the impact of one analyst's disclosure of HIV seropositivity on his
analytic sense of self. With admirable candor and uncommon
thoughtfulness, Cole shows how the analyst's disclosure of
information of the most meaningful sort may deepen and even
transform the therapeutic dialogue.
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