The defence strategies of the Aids pathologies towards finitude strongly recall those building themselves up during adolescence. An ego wounded and attacked by the unbinding forces and infantile ideals trying to disentangle themselves rest in the latter. The resurgence of the fantasy of immortality coming up again and unfolding itself during puberty enables the wiping out or the misappreciation of the wound. Through some extracts from the psychoanalytic cure of a patient suffering from Aids, we shall try to show how such a fantasy is liable to emerge and also how far the psychoanalyst, with reference to the idea of a forecast death may find himself blotted out from his position of neutrality and confronted to his own belief in immortality.
Archives de catégorie : ENG – Sexulités et SIDA – 1999 T. 17 n°2
Nino Rizzo : From the fear of love to love of aids
After the decade of the 80’s, Aids has become an unavoidable fact of life for teenagers and young adults. This may be indeed more psychological than real. It has become a social phenomenon with obvious quantitative and statistical aspects. How therefore is the psychological reality articulated in the individual confronted to Aids ? Such an articulation seems to depend upon the psychological structure of adolescence thus becoming some kind of » revelator » of this deep down structure. Through the analysis of a young borderline individual, the author tries to show its significance for such a youth, its place in her psychological economy and the benefits that may be, or have been, drawn from it. In the theoretical analysis that follows, the focus lies in the pertinence of the concepts of death instinct and life instinct in the clinical approach of borderline patients.
André-Michel Gardey : Regression and building of deferred actions, hiv positivity and trauma
This paper presents a clinical case in which an » unpleasant encounter » in reality, i.e. the announcement of bearing the HIV virus has entailed an immediate regression of the subject in time towards that very moment of his adolescence in which some kind of psychological rehandling had been stopped. It discusses the regression towards the infantile that took place, leading to a re-negociation in the deferred action of the Oedipian conflict that had suddenly been stopped and fixed on the occasion of the death of the father when the subject was 15. It suggests the hypothesis according to which this may have taken place again in a progredient rehandling in which his own confrontation to the death to come at last offered the subject the opprtunity, that had remained uncertain up to then, to identify himself to the father through death and thus regain some kind of filial relationship in a rehabilitation of its function. To leave behind a grandiose father, outside the possibilities of any form of identification, in order to erect an Oedipian father liable to be an ideal and also to be structuring, seems to have been one of the outcome of seropositivity.
Marie-Jose del Volgo : The fear of saÔd’s aids : Ali
On the occasion of a session meant to explore his breathing capacities, I receive Ali as an M.D. This youth, aged 25 will tell me about his feeling depressed and his fear of Aids. Due to the setting enabling » a moment to voice things « , and to this ethical position of listening to Ali with reference to the psychoanalytic method, the analysis of the signifyiers lead me to bring his fear of Aids and his brother’s together within the associations knot of his discourse. Amid a technoscientific medical approach which is gradually more and more dehumanized, clinical psychopathology and psychoanalysis have the vocation to restore the ethical function and value of illness and care
Didier Lauru : Madness of touch
The fear of Aids makes the love encounter far more complex and creates an upheaval in the relationships of adolescents in the course of their first approaches of sexuality. The mad desire to touch the other person, magnificently embodied in the love ideal, can be hindered.
The author thus wonders whether those adolescents were to repeat phylogenitically the several stages of courtly love.
Brigitte Dutillieux, Caroline Lebrun, Bérengère Porret : Aids : a sesame for fil santé jeunes
This paper shows how the theme of Aids is tackled and used by those youths who call Fil SantÈ Jeunes (a free help line). Aids appears there no longer as a displacement pattern but as a true illness we should make out among others the ordinary fantasmatic productions linked to the puberty problematics and the pathological discourse of young adults. Even in calls for fun, the listener must take into account the reality of the epidemics and should take car of prevention
Hubert Lisandre : A prevention of the angel ?
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.
Philippe Hofman : Adolescence, aids and prison
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.
Serge Lesourd : A new object of fantasy ?
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.
Moses Laufer : Sexual abuse or a delusional structure ? from adolescent to young adult
The treatment of an adolescent patient who recalled having been sexually abused in childhood by her father is described. In the course of treatment, various doubts were raised in the analyst’s mind about the truth of this memory.
As the analysis progressed, the analyst felt that the patient’s responses to interpretations were signs of the presence of a delusional structure. When the patient felt that the analyst doubted her memory, or was not on her side, she angrily and vengefully broke off her treatment. She remains a very vulnerable young woman.
The delusional structure contained the patient’s sexual need to destroy the male’s potency as a defense against her longing for the oedipal mother who, in reality, had left the patient for a new husband.