Paul Attinello – The Passionate Body – HIV-AIDS As Cultural Complex
Viral invasion, infection anxiety, illness, and death returning to the contemporary world–HIV/AIDS has been an intensely charged crisis in sexuality, medical awareness, and our relationship to sickness and death for forty years, and continues to be an ongoing disaster in many parts of the world. I will approach AIDS as a series of dense cultural complexes, all combining ancient roots with modern patterns, some of which have reappeared in the COVID pandemic. The archetypal narrative of the experience of HIV/AIDS as it exists in the ego, in the imagination, in the body, and in politics, links the unapproachable intensity of early death tied to physical passion. The passionate body is a generating focus – the body that desires, that is erotic – which is also the body that wants to live, that battles and demonstrates and engages with contagion, rot, and disintegration.
Paul Attinello, Ph.D., is a Jungian analyst in private practice who has taught at Newcastle University, the University of Hong Kong, and UCLA. He received his Ph.D. from UCLA and diploma as an analyst from the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich. He has lived and worked on four continents, been involved in creative and academic events and projects, and is co-founder of the Psychosocial Wednesdays seminar series. He has been a person with HIV since the early 1980s and has worked with HIV groups and programs in several countries. He is published in essay collections, journals, and reference works, including the groundbreaking Queering the Pitch: The New Lesbian & Gay Musicology, writing on contemporary musics, the culture of AIDS, and psychological and philosophical topics.