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9780195096279

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Basing his work on interviews with 19 men living with AIDS, gay psychotherapist Schwartzberg discusses how HIV-positive gay men have been able to continue living meaningful lives. -Booklist A Crisis in Meaning is precisely the book for which gay men have been eagerly waiting: a passionate yet balanced articulation of our struggles to make sense of a senseless epidemic and reconfigure meaning amid a culture of decimation. Steven Schwartzberg catalogues and astutely frames varied adaptations to HIV infection in insightful and lyrical prose, but allows the voices of men with HIV to claim center stage. In the tradition of Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, Schwartzberg's compelling book breaks new ground in forcing the reader to confront the complex, surprising, and often heroic ways the human spirit responds to catastrophe. -Eric Rofes, author of Reviving the Tribe: Regenerating Gay Men's Sexuality and Culture in the Ongoing Epidemic In elucidating more broadly the response of the gay community to the AIDS epidemic, Schwartzberg, who is gay, brings a proud, concerned personal perspective to bear. He defines the response as a three-phased, disbelief followed first by action and then by grief overload, and ends by making a strong case for managing the cumulative grief communally. -Kirkus Reviews This is a book that had to be written, and Steve Schwartzberg has done a wonderful job of it. Schwartzberg skillfully blends psychological research and theory with the poignant, thoughtful accounts provided by men living with AIDS. A Crisis of Meaning sensitively probes the complex and often surprising effects that AIDS has had. The work will be an invaluable resource to researchers and clinicians, as well as a highly readable, sometimes disturbing, but always enlightening account of the impact of the AIDS crisis. -Shelley E. Taylor, Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles [A Crisis of Meaning] is an important addition to the ever expanding list of writings about this modern-day holocaust. It illuminates the physiological and emotional ramifications faced by those who live with AIDS and HIV... For those who are HIV-positive or the primary caretakers or families or friends of people with AIDS, the book offers a powerful insight into the numerous options for coping in this crisis. -he Los Angeles Times

A salutary study - slightly overwhelmed by its enthusiasm for the theoretical - of strategies for meeting the crisis of meaning triggered by an HIV-positive diagnosis. Schwartzberg is a psychologist, and the book is clearly shaped by his clinical scruples and animated by the intermittent presence of 19 HIV-positive gay men he interviewed for the research component of his recent doctoral training. His study explores the search in the gay community to find some meaning in the AIDS epidemic, while concentrating on the behavior of individuals living in extremis. Schwartzberg identifies four categories of individual adaptation in those afflicted: Transformation, the optimal mode, wherein logical somersaults are respected as the price of maintaining meaning; Rupture, the reverse, when every element of one's life seems to fall apart; Camouflage, or self-deception, the shakiest position, marked by a desperate juggling of truth and illusion; and Impassivity, a more constitutional than situational response, of which inattention to reality is both cause and effect. The 19 subjects function as springboards and exemplars for the discussion (the profiles being too sketchy to resonate as case histories, and too few to aspire to statistical significance); Schwartzherg reports nonjudgmentally on their individual strategies and wisely recognizes that different choices reflect different thresholds of tolerance - for grief, anxiety, ambiguity. In elucidating more broadly the response of the gay community to the AIDS epidemic, Schwartzberg, who is gay, brings a proud, concerned personal perspective to bear. He defines the response as three-phased, disbelief followed first by action and then by grief overload, and ends by making a strong case for managing the cumulative grief communally. Ultimately, a textbookish but nonetheless supportive, enlightened study. (Kirkus Reviews)

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Steven Schwartzberg is a psychologist at McLean Hospital and Instructor in Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He has a private psychotherapy practice in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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