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.