Paul Attinello

Author: paulattinello

  • The party

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    by

    paulattinello
    in ,

    And so… a birthday party for Andrew, thrown mostly by his partner Michael and a number of helpful friends, in their large house. With many people from different places, who have different styles… lots of fun, the usual rambunctious cheer in some rooms, quieter and more relaxed in others, and a lot of talking and…

  • Downs… and ups

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    paulattinello
    in

    Zürich. Küsnacht. Jung-Institut. Two and a bit out of three weeks. I do seem to be emotionally volatile while I'm here… anxiety over my ability to become an analyst, excitement over new ideas – or, as you'll see, anger over new ideas – plumbing unexpected depths… Well, the past week was a rough one. Both…

  • Taut

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    by

    paulattinello
    in

    It has felt as though I'm living about four lives – and am able to comfortably manage, say, about two… university marking and administration with the year abroad, HIV patient group and clarifying everything for other people to take charge of parts of it, training at the Jung-Institut and trying to get into colloquia, schedule…

  • Amidst

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    paulattinello
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    Three psychoanalysis clients!… uh, patients? Analysands? And those terms: clients is too business-y of course; and after all the arguments in the 1980s in the AIDS community (the ones that created the term 'PWA'), I'm not comfortable calling anyone a 'patient'. Analysand… an exact and respectable term. Unfortunately a rather long one, and one most…

  • Mid–

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    paulattinello
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    Solstice night, nadir of the year. In the middle of the long night: the point where our day goes down to seven hours, then the direction reverses and the day rapidly lengthens… This winter I seem to be waking in the middle of the night – not a new thing: since my 2009 stroke I…

  • Joins

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    paulattinello
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    I sleep a lot in the past weeks… not in some sort of avoidance, just a quiet dream of winter… I keep being aware of the joins, the cracks, between the great blocks of things that can be seen: if when I was younger a great deal of my thinking, and ultimately my research, tended…

  • Recovering

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    paulattinello
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    Today's two-hour lecture was probably the last AIDs activity for a while… except of course for catching up with some counseling. Framed with a great deal of self-clarification – I felt the need to explain to my students that I was tired out by the subject… And then did parts of the 'AIDS Rage' lecture,…

  • Backwash

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    paulattinello
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    So, as the events and discussion around AIDS gradually dwindle… even after World AIDS Day, there are still backwashes (or perhaps: backdrafts?) from all these memories and feelings. Monday was the patient group discussion with graduate students in clinical psychology – which is always both easier and deeper than our more usual presentations for medical…

  • Eve

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    paulattinello
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    Tomorrow is December 1 – World AIDS Day – so… today is World AIDS Eve. Or something like that. (And December 2, an even more privately important day: the day Reid died of AIDS in 1983.) Last week I took a less cleaned-up, less – public version of my previous blog post to analysis. Discussion…

  • Death in…

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    paulattinello
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    I, Aschenbach… Perhaps, partially, because it is November: Scorpio, darkness… the weather has been suddenly, sharply colder the past two weeks; a couple of nights of miserably torrential rain, though more days are sunny than is usual for us here on the North Sea. But Scorpio is always the darkest part of the year for…