Psychological Aspects Of The AIDS Epidemic

AIDS HAS CHANGED ALL OF US, as mental-health professionals, as individual human beings, and as a society. Twenty years ago, none of us thought we would see so many hundreds of thousands of relatively young people dying of a communicable disease. AIDS has really humbled us. Through most of modern Western history there have been serious venereal diseases that were incurable. Many of us who came of age in the postpenicillin generation enjoyed a very brief, unusual window in the history of time, a time when it seemed that there were no fatal venereal diseases, and in which we thought there would be no more. We became arrogant in our faith in modern medicine. AIDS shocked us from our arrogance. It returned the specter of incurable venereal disease to us, and reminded us that nature is a formidable and clever adversary to human medicine, and will probably always stay one step ahead of man. Besides the terrible losses that we all have had to face, AIDS has forced psychological changes in all of us. It has forced us to rethink our relation to sickness and health, to mortality, sexuality, drug use, and what we consider valuable in life.

In this article I will address many aspects of AIDS, beginning with some historical perspective. I will tell, from my own viewpoint, how the AIDS epidemic evolved and how psychological attitudes, among patients and all of society, have shifted. I will explore ways in which psychoanalysis can help us understand the terrible, irrational reactions that have made the AIDS epidemic not only a medical tragedy, but a psychological tragedy for society and individuals. I will then describe what we have learned, from a psychoanalytic perspective, about working with people