Though being a » young homosexual » does not mean a specific risk of being contaminated by Aids, it may be studied as a priviledged figure of the psychological stakes liable to guide an adequate prevention, notably as regards the reference to the Oedipian father. Gabriel’s discourse, coming from a research dealing with the unconscious dimension of prevention, enables to stress a problematic » angelism » that may be considered as a real risk factor and questions reversely the present politics of prevention as well as the position of the psychologist in front of a youth on the register of his sexuality.
This paper tries to analyze the pathologies, behaviours, cultural hiatus and psychical representations of adolescents in prison. Such a research was conceived according to their own conception of Aids. The several multifarious associations generated by this illness stress the link existing between risk behaviours and sexual representations. Here the whole of the adolescent problematics becomes caricatural.
Aids is inscribed as a return of death within sexuality after the dazzling blaze of total enjoyment in the years of » sexual liberation « . It stresses the passage to adolescent genital sexuality of a hue which is quite different and yet quite similar to Freud’s cases of adolescents and Dora’s in particular. Such a return of death within the genital sexual accounts for the new sexual behaviours of adolescents (faithfulness, baby-couples, collective rapes) but also comes to be part and parcel of every adult cure, since the relationship towards the adult and towards love are now different, turning Aids into a real object of fantasy.
Starting from the realizing that prevention of Aids among adolescents and youths is important whereas the epidemics is of mediocre concern to that population, the author begins to ponder on the complexities of the social representations associating Aids and adolescence, starting from the idea that such categories result from a task of the social institutions. Hence developing a prevention discourse on Aids with those categories entails Aids to be thus integrated into a consensus discourse rather that speaking in terms of marginal categories (homosexuals, addicts, African migrants). When referring to both these categories, what is at stake are patterns of social functioning (the biographical institution in the case of adolescence, the territorial group for youth). Such a reading of the action of prevention shows the underlying political splitting, i.e. on the one hand, adolescence that should be protected from the risks run by Aids ; on the other hand, youth that should be protected from the risk run by society due to Aids.
The problematics of parental narcissistic objects who escape is illustrated in the observation of a young adolescent girl confronted to Aids and to her parents’ death.
Most questions asked by HIV positive adolescents belonging to our speech-group deal with the secret around the contaminations.
Such a secret entail splittings and denials which, at first, protect the adolescent and the rest of the family. Then, however, it rapidly turns into an attractor which swallows the emotional cathexes, which structures a post towards which the resistances of the discourse converge and which cristallizes the defence mechanism system into an organizing figure of both repetition and homeostasis.
The disavowal mechanisms of its transmission have been studied a great deal on the transgenerational level. Groups and family work however compell us to be more careful about new mechanisms, namely the processes and psychological mechanisms at work in the intergenerational dynamics.
The surge of HIV in the paediatric field shattered the life and future of families. It followed a reverse path with reference to the progress that could have been made in the approach of the consequences of separations, death and illnesses of any one relative, parent or child. It forced us to have new conceptions about life such as : the desire of a child, giving birth and life, bringing up, protecting, guiding, keeping alive, helping to live and helping to die. The mother, one of the children, sometimes the father, all wage a merciless war against the illness, against discrimination, isolation, the secret, pain, fear of death. Confronted to such an earthquake, the author questioned herself on what those infected children may or may not feel at adolescence. Through these clinical vignettes and what children say about themselves, the author tries to show what a tragical ordeal they are confronted to. How do they survive to such a slaughter ? How do they or don’t they achieve theyr task of mourning ? What memories do they keep or are they allowed to keep about their fathers, and/or their mothers ? What kind of personal history will they build therefrom ? What kind of guilt is their stake ? So many questions for which sometimes there are no specific answers ? The recent progress in the therapeutic field brought changes that are both synonyms of hope and of pain.
Revue semestrielle de psychanalyse, psychopathologie et sciences humaines, indexée AERES au listing PsycINFO publiée avec le concours du Centre National du Livre et de l’Université de Paris Diderot Paris 7