Richard Lloyd Jones: In the 1960s, we saw a sexual revolution. The pill. Women's liberation. Rejection of 1950s repression. It all culminated in the philosophy of, as Stephen Stills so perfectly put it, loving the one you're with. But then came the 80s, and the monster of AIDS reared its ugly head. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones, and today I'm Thinking with Somebody Else's Head, another look at AIDS.
These programs are exploring the ideas that dominate our society. Ideas that often started in the heads of people who've been dead for a long time but who still influence us today. Which wouldn't be a bad thing except for the fact that they're often wrong today. Thanks to some extraordinary work being done by a Brazilian psychoanalyst named Norberto Keppe and his International Society of Integral Psychoanalysis, we have the scientific tools to investigate those old ideas.
Take them off the shelf, dust them off and reinvestigate them, if you will, to find out if they're still appropriate to remain as foundations of our society. Many times they're not. You can subscribe to this podcast at somebodyelse'shead.blogspot.com. Our last look at AIDS dealt with the standard mythology of AIDS that has scared the shit out of us for the past 20 years or so.
AIDS is caused by a virus called HIV. It's sexually transmitted, and there's no known cure. And, of course, we took that one apart pretty well. Today, a more psychological view. Helena Melander is a Swedish journalist who's been investigating and writing about the latest in psychosomatic research here in Brazil for the past three years. What she's finding is a very different picture from the usual one.
Recently, she interviewed Dr. Roberto Giraldo, an infectologist at Cornell Hospital in New York, and got his take on the causes of AIDS. Helena, what is Dr. Giraldo saying?
He's speaking about stress agents, that what happens in the case of AIDS is that AIDS actually isn't a disease. It's a state of the body where the immune system has collapsed. And the stress agents can be different in different situations, different countries.
In the developed world, we see stress agents like pollution, drugs, smoking, diets, emotional stress, depression. In the developing countries the situation is completely different. In Africa, for example, where we always hear that there is a big catastrophe related to AIDS, there is a situation of extreme poverty, subnutrition, very bad hygiene. And all these create a physical stress in the organism which, if it's like constant, finally will make the immune system collapse.
And we can even see it's very even interesting in the case of Africa that there they usually don't make the HIV test to see if the person has HIV, they just check the symptoms. So if the person has had fever for example for several months, different intestine diseases, then the person is diagnosed with HIV. But these diseases are diseases that have existed for a long time on the African continent and that are exactly related to the poverty in the region.
Richard: Okay, well let's zip back across the ocean back to North America for a moment. In light of Giraldo's ideas about stress agents, how can we look at the origins of AIDS in light of this?
The first thing that happened was when the gay community started to get this problem in the beginning of the 80s, the last years of the 70s. The gay movement in the 70s had a kind of liberation.
And this also meant certain parts of the gay community were like having parties for days with many, many different sexual partners. They were using drugs all day long without sleeping, many times without eating, using more drugs as food than real food. And this is obvious that this is not related to the fact of being homosexual in itself but this is very aggressive to the organism.
And also during this time a kind of drug was used called poppers, actually based on a medical substance that is used at transplantations of organs. It is to decrease the defense of the immune system for the body not to reject the organ. And this was used to like open the anus for sexual relationships and it's obvious that this, of course, also will have the same effect in the body, meaning that the immune system will be weakened.
And it was exactly in these communities that AIDS first appeared. Gay men who were extreme drug abusers. So actually the first theory about AIDS was that it was caused by drugs. And this theory was later deviated and it came up this idea about the virus. But still today we can see that a big percentage of the people that get AIDS are drug abusers.
Richard: Yeah, this stress, this extreme lifestyle you describe would punish the body, wouldn't it? And there must be something underlying that too. How do you see that, Helena?
Actually, you can say it's a kind of lifestyle without limits. When you want to live a life totally like in accordance with your own wishes, your own will, kind of extreme lifestyle where you don't respect yourself, you don't respect your own body.
Tom de Fredinando that I interviewed from New York, that is working with AIDS patient there, he said he could perceive this in the patients. That they have a self-loathing, who don't accept themselves, who don't like themselves, and who are like being aggressive against themselves. And I think we can perceive this that many times the people that do this kind of extreme actions like having a lot of sexual partners, taking drugs for many days or like without sleeping for several days, they are not feeling well.
They are feeling anguished even if in the moment, it can be a kind of, how can I say, ecstasy or a kind of feeling of happiness. In the moment, I think after, the person will have a kind of emotional hangover. He'll feel depressed, then he will have to take more drugs, and then he's escaping from himself even more. So it's a kind of self-attack, actually, that we can see.
And not the opposite, that we imagine that it's a question of freedom, of liberation, of acceptance.
Richard: There's always a lot more going on in the human experience than we've come to see. What we're finding at the International Society of Integral Psychoanalysis is that our ideas about many things are completely upside down. AIDS is just one example. I'm Richard Lloyd Jones.
