You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This book is both a general study of the HIV/AIDS virus and its implications,- and an account of the planning, carrying out and following through of a one day experimental workshop on ‘Group responses to the Aids Crisis’.
Angela Molnos, well-known as a group analyst and innovator in the field of shortterm psychotherapy, writes in her introduction: ‘This book addresses a wide range of professionals as well as the general reader who is keen to reflect upon the ways in which our shared unconscious seems to react to the spread of the HIV infection, which is just one of the life threatening phenomena of our age’. The key word in this passage is unconscious. The shared unconscious attitudes of the general public and more particularly of professionals, carers and those directly related to HIV/AIDS patients, were brought into greater conscious awareness through the focused experience of a group of sixty people, gathered in a one-day experimental workshop in December 1987.
Part I of the book describes the retrovirus HIV in terms of its physical effects, but also most illuminatingly in terms of its psychological effect in undermining and reversing many of our social values and expectations. Most profoundly, sex from being associated with love and pleasure becomes associated with fatal disease; blood, the necessity for life, becomes the carrier of death. Angela Molnos writes about the destructive impact of this reversal upon our sense of ‘meanings’ with a kind of passionate sadness. She goes on to describe the relevance of group analysis in providing a means of sharing experience and so increasing our available energy and understanding to meet the crisis.
Part II of the book is a detailed description of the workshop ‘from the first idea to the final format’. It will be of the greatest interest to all those involved in group analytic work as it gives an extremely clear and honest description of the day from the point of view of convenors, staff and participants. As would be expect