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What do I look for in good psychoanalytic writing? One way of answering my question might be, I
look for books like this one. It is one of the most enjoyable and useful analytic books I have read in a long time—open, thoughtful, creative, wide-ranging, deep, integrative, challenging; also messy, nonlinear, relatively lacking in prescriptions and clear conclusions, and touching on as many interesting points in passing as it does in its core intent. (Perhaps that is part of its core intent.) And what does it mean that such qualities would come to dwell in a book about the experiences of an HIV-positive psychoanalyst?
I would offer the perhaps uncomfortable proposition that the lives of all psychoanalysts have been shaped by (and have helped shape) the course of the HIV/AIDS epidemic; the past two decades have been very different from what we would have foreseen for our futures. Sometimes we have been conscious, active participants in work with and for people with HIV/AIDS, as theorists, clinicians, consultants, and researchers. Less often analysts have been among those who have been obstacles to those of us doing the work; more often, to our collective shame, analysts have been spectators. That was so when the epidemic first erupted, when my waiting room, as many others, was occupied by men with purple spots of their faces, and it is true in different, more interesting and also more troubling, ways now, when it sometimes seems that AIDS (at least lethal AIDS, AIDS-beyond-reach), like factories, has largely migrated to the Third World. Though, of course, that is not entirely true. It is still, indeed like the Third World, quite powerfully present among us.
One might also say, or at least try the proposition on for size, that the past two decades have seen a trajectory for psychoanalysis very different from what it might have predicted for itself in an earlier time. Our field—or should that be a plural?—has experienced rich theoretical, empirical, and practical developm