H. I. and V. or the love letters

Cahiers de psychologie clinique, 2012/1, n°38, p. 161-177.

H.I. & V., OR THE LOVE LETTERS

SUMMARY The AIDS epidemic presents a considerable chal- lenge to the laws of love and desire. Whether contaminated or not, those who love each other cannot escape the effects of the imaginary disturbance that the H.I.V. virus creates. Clinical experience teaches us that sexual risk is more a testimony to a subject’s psychic adaptation toward desire than surrender in the face of the death instinct. With Lacan and Freud, we can discern some elements of the psychological processes of anxiety, which can shed light on the process of fantasy and love in a constantly renewed effort to work on the framework that supports them.

KEY WORDS AIDS, barebacking, the disturbing, object of desire, object a.

ABSTRACT The AIDS epidemic severely challenges the laws of love and desire. Whether contaminated or not, those who love each other cannot escape the imaginary disturbance that the H.I.V. virus creates. Clinical experience teaches us that sexual risk is more a testimony to a subject’s psychic adaptation in favor of desire rather than its capitulation before the forces of the death drive. With Lacan and Freud, we can discern some elements of the psychic processes of anxiety, capable of illuminating the progression of fantasy and love in a constantly renewed effort to work on the framework that supports them.

“Blinded by the brilliance of its wandering light, You swear, in the night where fate plunged you, To hold it always: from your dying hand It already escapes.

At least you will have seen a sublime flash gleam; It will have furrowed your life for a moment;

As you fall, you can carry into the abyss Your dazzlement.

And if there reigned in the depths of the peaceful sky A pitiless being who contemplated suffering,

If his eternal eye considers, impassive, Birth and death,

On the edge of the tomb, and under that very gaze, May a movement of love still be your farewell!

Yes, show how great man is when he loves, And forgive God!”

Louise Akermann (1813-1890), Love and Death (last verses).

It is said that love letters are no longer written as they once were. The hypertrophied communication of modern life, woven into a network, is said to have overcome the flirtations of yesteryear. Impoverished, amorous speech would survive only rachitic, reduced to the encryption of a short message service designated as irrefutable proof of the circumscribed glory of the instantaneous against the fibrous and slow embroidery of desire. If we can voluntarily oppose this ill-conceived assessment, it is in the light of the experience of speech in psychoanalysis that we dismantle these arguments one by one, and find that none of them hold true. This is because there remains a text of another dimension whose material is not held, and whose letters are not strung out at will. H., I. and V. are such letters, missives without envelopes in the service of the subject’s unconscious text. As in E. Poe’s short story 2, no one knows their factual content, and no one needs it to act accordingly. An invisible particle to the naked eye, the AIDS virus lends itself fantastically to the vicissitudes of the psyche and its processes. Unless the kinetics of the death drive are unleashed by pathos, we argue that sexual risk-taking is largely at work for the sake of Eros more than Thanatos; this is our hypothesis supported by our experience. The paradox and contradiction that emerge from it against common sense, which is too talkative, and even contrary to the dramas and singularly encountered effects, make it difficult for the subject to spell out the fragments of an impending knowledge, and the clinician is not left out. This is because distress must be set aside so as not to clutter the area of recovery, which begins with the word, with its demands, to preserve it from the despair or depression that follow. For beyond common belief, we must take another sexual risk, in the Freudian sense, that of not backing down from what love achieves victories for the subject, sometimes indexed to the course of life. No romanticism in tracing and reading the subtle intricacies of love and death in the psychic life of the beings we are, an elucidation perhaps, the only valid addition to the ethical aspiration for a life more decided than endured. Human sexuality continues to reveal itself in these traits in times of AIDS, just as psychoanalysis has opened up its field.

The a of the object of desire

The announcement of seropositivity is, by all accounts, a true trauma, an unprecedented event. Discovery — for this is how the doctor, friend, psychologist, partner, and the person themselves express it — is a major signifier; it informs us about the quality of this event, its conscious and unconscious scope, whose effects are felt even in the transferential and technical modalities of possible, and sometimes impossible, psychic work. The revelation associated with it is akin to a breach and trauma, from the collective to the individual. This is because the unveiling of the sexual that the AIDS epidemic inaugurates when

HIV was discovered in 1983 3 continues to be replayed with each discovery of each seropositivity. But what exactly is discovered? In the aftermath of the departure of seropositive patients who consulted for a few months, we revisit the reflection on these experiences here. A common movement in some of these journeys takes shape a posteriori. This difficult discovery leads to a freezing of thought, which protects itself, shelters, or withdraws. While speech sometimes remains possible in the moment (which can be beneficial for some patients), most often the incision produced heavily demobilizes ordinary thinking capabilities, relegated under the aegis of an eclipse whose rampart can only be dissipated under certain conditions guaranteeing a psychic recovery from this event and its effects. For this discovery is intrinsically linked to its consequences, neither more nor less, and it is not always possible to discriminate them. An amalgam is created that makes it difficult for the detachment conducive to subjective recovery in an effort of speech. All of them came to consult a shrink after time had passed since the discovery of their seropositivity, a short or extended time, always distinct, during which the discovery remained at their discretion or even completely silenced, by obreption. Then, thanks to a mobilization whose reasons remain to be discussed, they put an end to this latency period.

Let us now put forward a hypothetical element to give meaning to this effect of discovery, clinically observed. We consider that what is discovered here is indeed the sexual, in a renewal of its unveiling during HIV screening. The transformations, translations, and reworkings that are activated have led us to reread some pages of the theory of analytical or psychotherapeutic experience on the processes of subjectivation in adolescence.

“The re-appropriation of the drive in the psychic can be defined as a demand for work imposed on the psyche as a consequence of its relationship to the body (in this respect, one can understand that the adolescent process, a work of introjective elaboration of puberty, can constitute its model).” 4

Seropositive individuals, too, must grapple with a re-engagement of the question of the sexual through the surprising and irremediable transformation of a reality experience with violent repercussions. It is the question of a sexual identity in upheaval and the processes of subjectivation linked to it that arises. Not only does the subjective question at play offer similarities with the adolescent question, but it is also in terms of malleability and temporality of the psychotherapeutic process that we observe points of convergence. The necessary psychic mobilization formalizes itself in the mode of a crisis, at the heart of which, as in the adolescent crisis, inevitable negotiations with Oedipal objects appear. The subject’s place is discussed based on their relationship to the Other, and the desires at work in the affective and psychic movements under examination, perceptible in filigree from a historical triangulation. 5

“The construction of the infantile in psychoanalytic treatment falls within the logic of adolescent metabolization, which retroactively puts into perspective the structural thresholds of adult psychic organization as so many virtual developmental delays.” 6

Just as in adolescence, the unveiling of the sexual provoked by the announcement of seropositivity is a re-unveiling of the infantile sexual put aside during the pre-pubertal latency period. Something of the order of active psychic secrecy or concealment, of repression, is countermanded. What appears is what deserved not to be seen or disclosed so much. The real tears through fantasy and fixes the subject at the point of their unconscious sexual determination, causing immense disturbance, a loss of their psychic motility. The absolute necessity of explanations is not long in making itself felt. What has happened and what is happening must find the arguments for its logical demonstration, capable of reasoning what seems to be able to escape it. The adolescent can rely on the meaning of the fate reserved for them by life, of having to become an adult whether they want to or not, from which their identificatory project as an adult unfolds. The person discovered to be seropositive most often takes refuge in questioning the how, to the detriment of the why, which is inaccessible at first, and yet indispensable for psychic work, as it is the only possible realization of this sexual revolution required to emerge from the crisis.

We must present a clinical fact encountered many times regarding becoming seropositive. Patients’ accounts are marked by a dispersion of explanations about HIV contamination, from which we retain the enigmatic or fantastic (in the sense of fantasy) texture, at the border of what is said and what remains in the margin. The history of contamination is subject to a reworking in the manner of a screen memory as a means of subreption when it conceals a conflictual content. This history also resembles a primal scene, an allegory of contamination. These are two of its psychic functions that we have encountered. In this dual capacity, it is often altered, embellished, corrupted, or circumvented according to the moment or the interlocutor. Let us specify that it is the screen memory that takes on the imaginary value of a primal scene — and not the reverse — due to its content being favorable to a correspondence with the infantile aspect of the primal scene. The adjustment it undergoes (the memory) requires recognizing its function as a screen, as Freud described it. But what it stages inaugurates, in the aftermath, the opportunity for a profitable imaginary attempt by the subject to rewrite the origin of a conception (that of contamination), from which it emerges that they were not there, just like the mythical scene of the conception of the unborn child who could not have been there yet. And not being there leads to the tendency to prioritize causality over significance, to recompose facts rather than access the desires that underlie them: the how in compensation for the why.

The destabilization of the discovery of seropositivity is equivalent to a traumatic collapse. In his Reflections on Trauma, Ferenczi discusses “psychic commotion” and the “shock” […] equivalent to the annihilation of the sense of self” 7. We must pinpoint its timing. Common understanding often tends to attribute a prior failure as the responsible motive for contamination, forgetting that it is only the biological consequence of a subjective history determined from another plane. The defeat that contamination can represent

cannot be considered the result of some predisposition or the work of the death drive, of which it would be the culmination. It does not illustrate the disturbance of suicidal urges. If these are effective on occasion, they must be appreciated for what they are, as the subject would suffer their consequences distinctly from their effects in reality, from one register to another, without literal translations. If this were not the case, we would have to give credence to the self-destruction so often invoked, and which we know from experience does not withstand contradiction. The matter is more complex.

When Hermann 8 presented for his first appointment, nothing indicated in advance the revelatory effect that this clinical encounter would provoke. A dynamic man in his thirties, of Scandinavian origin, seropositive for nearly five years, diagnosed almost immediately after contamination, an active homosexual who enjoyed partying and multiple encounters, a consumer of all kinds of drugs, an athlete: this was the identity repertoire he presented to me from the very first moments of the initial interview. Then, his childhood and family history set the scene and the drama of a painful immigration story. The violence among siblings, parental distress, the fate of a family adrift in a France where none of its members found bearings, desires, or joys. With five boys to care for, the mother was materially and emotionally overwhelmed; Hermann, the youngest, suffered the ill effects; fed, cared for but “unloved,” he remembers having wanted to die very early on, without ever discerning the reasons.

We continue the interviews. A few weeks pass. A thought troubles him. As outlandish or crazy as it may seem, his life appears more interesting and happier since he has been “sick.” He is embarrassed by this idea and struggles to provide explanations, doubting that there are any, as if it could not be explained or made sense.

Reviewing his journey year by year as if to detect a rough edge, Hermann explores his life by speaking. The narrative unfolds, and gradually a myriad of elements converge, progressively tightening until the tipping point of a story abruptly cut short by a truth effect. Even as he utters the words as they come, his gaze betrays his surprise at hearing something beyond the literal text of what he recounts: “In fact! The day I was told I was seropositive, that’s when my death wishes disappeared.” It’s as if Hermann had always known it; it takes on the appearance of a discovery, for it is an authentic exhumation. In the process, he questions potential self-destructiveness and seeks to gauge the death wish he has carried within him since childhood. Failing to have desired to die himself, Hermann understands that he needed to kill things within him. Then a question arises: to be a man, but which one? The subsequent interviews reveal how the “illness” of a first seropositive lover held the promise of a personal kind of healing: an identity healing, woven from an articulation with an imaginary object, a fortunate agreement supporting his desire and capable of reinvigorating his disapproved identifications. With that man, Hermann had less to fear his desires and aspirations. That the other had allowed him to be, so that the imaginization 9 that the virus benefits from through “the illness” must be examined to translate it as an object cause of desire, distinct from the object of desire, which Lacan invites us not to confuse.

The H.I.V., invisible to the naked eye, incredibly accommodates psychic processes and mimics the representable consistency of an imaginary object with real effects. We can only support its interest for the psychic economy as a currency of desire bridged with bonus love and its object. If it cannot be confused with the object of desire, it comes close enough for their overlap to be possible, as long as useful, until the real comes to detach them from each other, and feign to free the object cause of desire from a fictitious arrest, in a moment of significant subjective fall of which coitus remains here an exemplary place and moment. Let’s take, for example, Louise Hogarth’s film, The Gift 10 (the gift, the donation). Bug Chasers, literally Virus Hunters, are interviewed to explain their motivations in seeking contamination. One of them expresses how the virus could become the object to be realized, to be actually caught, in a movement of confusion between identity and identification, the former being considered to rescue the latter. For him, the question is to be able to become someone — on an identity level — to find his place among others, to ensure a community of belonging, to be a homosexual man and to get closer to what they seem to be and to have. Another develops his hope of no longer having to fear, thanks to his contamination, becoming seropositive. For his birthday, he invites participants better endowed than himself for a priapism without return; the dimension of the gift through seroconversion takes on a singular appearance. In both cases, the realization of contamination, which attests to the success of the initial project, is accompanied by a movement of depreciation and depression, encouraging in one regrets — for not having realized before what it would imply — in the other the dissipation of the anxiety of becoming seropositive, already supplanted by the anxiety linked to acquired seropositivity 11. The virus functioning as an object cause of desire (object a) takes on its full value when, at the confluence of its accession and its fall, the anxiety seizing the subject appears, which we guess precedes the void prior to the relaunch of desire towards another place of its cause.

For Hermann, as for the two men in Louise Hogarth’s film, we can say that the real history of contamination — which screening attests to — turns out to be the residual history of a phantasmatic history engaging the subject of the unconscious. And we observe how difficult it is for most of the patients encountered to free themselves from the ruts of a depressive discourse — which alone would justify having taken risks, as if it were necessary to acknowledge the weight of malaise and its destructions — to explain risk-taking when it, on the contrary, reflects an attempt that should be appreciated for what it is, namely a work of connection. The various intertwined dimensions can be considered step by step in the work of speech. To express it in Freudian terms, we say that risk-taking works for the sake of Eros and not Thanatos. Risks are taken with a view to construction; their reasons are not futile, but imperative. Clinical experience can account for the obstacles and impediments that contaminated patients experience in the

path that is nevertheless necessary for them, to give full value to their personal history, to their subjective truth, and of which the sexual as a component requires them to open up to their unconscious 12. This is to give full scope to these ultimate attempts at appeasement, at identification, which are these ill-named risk behaviors.

We know that the object cause of desire (object a) tends to be represented at the heart of an object of desire which it is not, but which vectorizes it. This contributes to the rapprochement of the imaginary of risk and the sexual imaginary, almost logically justifying that a biological sexual risk is taken by the very fact of sexual risk (Freudian), inherent in human sexuality. This allows us to understand what we consider to be an error made by prevention policies, that of believing in sexual risk taken as an unequivocal behavior that they extol, ignorant of its complexity. The development of so-called sexual risk reduction policies confirms this obstinacy. When applied to sex, like drug use risk reduction policies, they demonstrate this lack of consideration for the unconscious determination of sexuality, which ultimately fails. Drug use risk reduction focuses on considering the risk associated with a behavior; it does not consider the behavior itself, from which it expects no change a priori, unless the person concerned demonstrates it themselves. Differently, sexual risk reduction is trapped in a hierarchy of behaviors — as many primal scenes? — for lack of being able to clarify the risk incurred — which can only be appreciated in the variations we have just given it. At the threshold of its utterance, the discourse of prevention again stumbles upon the thickness of the protean and rebellious risk it would like to circumscribe, not knowing what it fundamentally is, far beyond what it appears to be for it: the fraudulent object of a behaviorist dissertation. The risk of intravenous injection is very far from constituting a paradigm of sexual risk; not all practices can be reduced to definable behaviors. The historical success of risk reduction policies with drugs relies essentially on the overdetermination of the act by the phenomenon of addiction; even the most alienating sexual practices always rely more on desire than on its extinction by the flash of injection: this is a small, unavoidable difference. Everything then contributes to apprehending this sexual risk as a real risk, which it is not, though its consequences are. But we know from our experience that sexual risk, articulated at this point of confusion between the object of desire and the object cause of desire, primarily stems from an imaginary or phantasmatic risk before being balanced by the reality of sex itself: it does not belong immediately to the phenomenal world. By comparing behaviors, prevention policies take the delicate risk of not appreciating sexual acts for what they are, namely that they are not behaviors.

Risk, a figure of the Other

The journey we have just made reveals — we cannot say it better — the discovery of something impossible to see, which, when re-seen, stuns and obliterates the subject. It orders the desire to cause it and questions its object to depose it. This invites us to consider the Lacanian reading of what is shown of this order, with object a, which, appearing to the subject in its crudity outside of imaginary capture, provokes anxiety. The stories we have discussed account for this appearance from the other of the sexual, up to its resolution in acts. In the interval, we can introduce an intermediary to deploy with Freud’s Unheimliche 13, re-read by Lacan 14, this particular anxiety linked to a certain return, which gives these narratives another color.

Das Unheimliche is the title of an article Freud dedicated to the uncanny in 1919. This notion presents itself as complex, polysemic. Its modulations are explored under the shadow of ambivalence and contradiction, when the latter operates from proximity, at the limit of confusion between a meaning and its opposite. So much so that the difficulty in approaching what cannot be summarized or function entirely as a concept mimics the psychic processes that clinical practice and

theoretical elaboration attempt to write or describe about it. Unheimlich is a common word, referring to everything that is contrary to the familiar, designated by heimlich.

“What is most interesting for us from this long quotation is that, among the multiple nuances of its meaning, the little word heimlich also presents one where it coincides with its opposite unheimlich. What is heimlich then becomes unheimlich, […]. Unheimlich would only be used as opposed to the first meaning, but not to the second.” 15

“Heimlich is therefore a word that develops its meaning towards an ambivalence, until it eventually coincides with its opposite unheimlich. Unheimlich is, in a way, a kind of heimlich.” 16

The double, the reflection, and the reversal into the opposite hold his attention. The Larousse French-German dictionary gives the following definition for unheimliche:

“strange and unsettling, which gives a shiver.” Apart from the return of the association of the root strange and the word unsettling, this proposition brings us closer to Freud’s when he retains the following terms for the French translation: unsettling, sinister, gloomy, ill at ease. He also relies on the Arabic and Hebrew versions for which the unhei-mliche “coincides with demonic: that which makes one shudder.” 17

In his lecture of November 28, 1962, Lacan makes it his cornerstone for addressing anxiety, which he takes as the theme of his seminar that year.

“We are now in a position to answer the question – when does anxiety arise? Anxiety arises when a mechanism makes something appear in the place that I will call, to make myself understood, natural, namely the place (-j ), which corresponds, on the right side, to the place occupied, on the left side, by the a of the object of desire. I say something – understand anything.”

“From now until next time, I ask you to take the trouble to reread, with this introduction that I give you, Freud’s article on Unheimlichkeit. It is an article that I have never heard commented on, and of which no one even seems to have noticed that it is the indispensable linchpin for addressing the question of anxiety. Just as I approached the unconscious through the Witz, this year I will approach anxiety through Unheimlichkeit.”

“The unheimlich is what appears in the place where the (-j ) should be. What everything starts from, in fact, is imaginary castration, because there is, and for good reason, no image of lack. When something appears there, it is, if I may express myself thus, that lack comes to be lacking.” 18

The ambivalence of the Un/heimlich/e introduced by Freud is highlighted in Lacan’s schema 19 by making it function as the mark of the transport into the Other of the function of a: the neurotic’s redoubled demand. What comes into (-j) destabilizes the alchemy of lack, which, coming to be lacking, produces anxiety. This is because it absolutely needs this lack to make the a of the object of desire function in the Other, and to guarantee the ability to ask to be asked, since that is its way of desiring. But what is to appear in this place and fulfill this function for anxiety to arise? What qualities does the object with the value of a respond to?

We know with Lacan that it is from (- j ) as a mark of lack in the Other that the contours of object a and the emergence of i(a), the image of the body, are delineated. How can we recognize a if not by its function?

“To put it simply, if it concerns the pervert or the psychotic, the relation of the fantasy ($ a) is instituted in such a way that a is in its place on the side of i(a). In this case, to handle the transferential relation, we must indeed take into ourselves the a in question, like a foreign body, an incorporation of which we are the patient, because the object, insofar as it is the cause of its lack, is absolutely foreign to the subject who speaks to us.”

“In the case of neurosis, the position is different, insofar as something of its fantasy appears on the side of the image i’(a). In x, something appears that is an a, and only appears to be so – because a is not speculable, and cannot appear here, if I may say so, in person. It is only a substitute. It is only from this that the profound questioning of all authenticity in the classical analysis of transference is motivated.” 20

Something can therefore take the place, provided it appears capable of holding it, of the a for the neurotic. And if this something is only held by appearing to be so, since the a is not speculable, this something must at least guarantee to nourish the fiction, its qualities are then indexed to it. What do we know about the a? Lacan’s modulations on its conceptual creation are too numerous to be summarized. We understand that anything can support the necessary promise to sustain the fantasy and the illusion of the i(a). “The a, support of desire in fantasy, is not visible in what constitutes for man the image of his desire” 21. The

H.I.V. can be conceived as being able to support desire in fantasy, as capable of holding this place of the object cause of desire (object a) for a subject. Especially since it allows the function of a to be transported into the Other, as we mentioned above; and it guarantees for the neurotic not to have to back down from having “to make of his castration what the Other lacks” 22.

The physiological reality of serological statuses is not taken into consideration; what matters is that a lack is illustrated in the other to articulate one’s own. Hermann makes his first “sick” lover hold something he does not have, which guarantees that this lover functions for him as the Other. But how can this happen for his lover? Not wanting to be the one to contaminate him, Hermann’s lover, having perceived something of the cause of his companion’s desire, left him. Hermann can now explain how he had to go about finding the virus elsewhere. It took him five years to be contaminated by HIV and to have proof of it. A first contamination by the Hepatitis C virus did not worry him; it even disappointed him because that disease, in his eyes, was not serious.

Settled in a couple, Hermann adopts and has his new seropositive partner adopt “no kpote” sex. Years pass and screenings remain negative. This is because treatments are effective and his friend has an undetectable viral load, stabilized below twenty copies, thus considered non-contaminating. It was by introducing a third lover into the couple, presenting all the characteristics, visible to Hermann, of a contaminating virus carrier, that Hermann’s seroconversion finally occurred.

Indeed, illnesses or the risk of illness possess this capacity for awakening that we occasionally encounter. However, H.I.V.

has the added dimension of conversing with the promise of love, intertwining the subject’s desire with genital sexual desire. Here, sexual risk and the risk of contamination particularly reflect the subject’s exposure to the desire of the Other, echoing the organism’s exposure to potentially contaminated bodily fluids. Risk and threat are figures of the Other. And if H.I.V. functions to articulate the subject’s desire, the actualization of contamination almost erases all traces of it, making way for a new configuration, a new knotting as necessary as Hermann was able to attest.

The contaminated partner literally carries an object, something the other does not possess and has no idea of, something they cannot represent (in the sense of what can be mirrored). So much so that many affected patients have recounted what it did to their capacity for love, distorting it to the point of madness or transgression, as if they had to resist and attempt to love

“as a psychotic or a pervert” in the face of this reality of sex revealed by H.I.V.: an internal rupture became necessary for the loving relationship to emerge. How can one love? How can one ensure that what is lacking in the other is maintained? How can one preserve one’s capacity for love when seropositivity and the experience it entails unveil a piece of the mechanics of desire, at the risk of prohibiting the subject? How to deal with this H.I.V. that creates a hole?

In this vein, the discourse of barebacking (a discourse advocating risk-taking) accounts, in a certain

way, for this schism in the mechanics of fantasy and love, for the collapse of the conditions supporting desire. Whatever one may say and beyond what it has become, the discourse of barebacking is primarily an effect of seropositivity itself, an effect of H.I.V., long before it is the product of seropositive individuals. It is a structural symptom, a snag in the discourse in the sense of an adjustment of the capacity for love and desire, not an ideology. Here appears not the imaginary promise, but the effect of H.I.V. as a real, a real capable of treating the symbolic.

A seropositive patient highlights a striking aspect of this schema: “Insofar as I cannot help but think that I have it (H.I.V.) and that I fear transmitting it to him, how could I, like him (her partner) who loves me and gives to me, love him by wanting to give him something?” In a play of reflections and opposites, the difficulty of living with seropositivity, despite appearances, supports this perspective. Thus, we can understand this difficulty for people living with the virus to manage anxieties related to potential risks of contamination, for example. For it is perhaps easier in love to be the one who can receive than the one who can give? One must be able to give without too much fear of losing oneself or losing the other, to be in a position to receive the other’s request, for it is a request that is awaited, not the object related to it, which it is better not to come too much for it to last. Seropositivity can permanently impede this logic of love, to put it simply.

It is here that complaints and distress find their full expression: “I will no longer be able to love as before,” “Who can love me under these conditions?” It is in this movement that a patient, one day, concluded his sessions with a statement that we reformulate: “It’s not enough to become seropositive; one must also know why.” The work he had just accomplished allowed him to explore and partly create what, from his sexual experience, articulated his subjective position – and vice versa – and for which contamination demanded that he not remain ignorant throughout his life. Psychological work can venture into the exploration of the vestiges of fantasy, and strive for the rearrangement of these conditions of love and desire. New psychic creations are possible, in an overcoming and transformation of the how of becoming seropositive, even beyond the mere why, towards other constructions.