Infecting the Treatment: Being An HIV-Positive Analyst is an intimate and deeply insightful examination of the impact of Gilbert Cole's 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. This examination sets the stage for a clinical discussion of the pros and cons of disclosure of HIV seropositivity to one's patients. What begins as consideration of disclosure of an ostensibly medical fact, in turn, opens to an exploration of the broader problematic of disclosure in the context of questions that all clinicians wrestle with - questions of sameness and difference, of dependence and autonomy, and of the ethical ground of psychoanalytic practice.

Cole 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. This metaphor gained expression in his employment of a technique used in Method Acting Training, an exercise that he commends to all psychoanalytic therapists.

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 rides the crest of the recent relational turn in psychoanalytic theory and practice. It is difficult to imagine a more compelling demonstration of the ways in which the analyst's subjectivity helps shape the clinical encounter. With admirable candor and uncommon thoughtfulness, Cole shows how the analyst's disclosure of information of the most meaningful sort - here medical information about a serious condition -- may deepen and even transform the therapeutic dialogue. In the process, he teaches us a much-needed lesson about the inevitable vulnerability to infection of all kinds that we collectively share.