On Infecting the Treatment by Gilbert W. Cole, PhD

ABSTRACT

The author discusses Gilbert Cole's Infecting the Treatment: The Experience of an HIV-Positive Psychoanalyst. He sees the book as showing something crucial concerning clinical psychoanalysis and the much discussed topics of intersubjectivity and self-disclosure. All therapists have to offer to their patients is their own subjective experience. What the patient wants and needs is a careful, thoughtful and honest account of the therapist's experience of him. This can help the patient draw his own conclusions about himself. The author sees Cole's work as demonstrating the relation between the particular and the universal in psychoanalysis. The specific subject is the situation of the HIV-positive psychoanalyst. Yet, for all its dramatic specialness, being an HIV-positive analyst is not necessarily more special than any individual, idiosyncratic aspect of any analyst's subjectivity is special. What one learns from sharing Cole's experience applies to all therapists.

KEYWORDS:

• AIDS
• HIV
• intersubjectivity
• psychoanalysis
• psychotherapy
• self-disclosure
• subjectivity