The Difficult News of the Diagnostic of Aids to Youngsters: Psychoanalytic Considerations from a Winnicottian Perspective

Abstract

The increase in the survival rate of patients with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome brought new challenges to the psychological clinic. The task of communicating the diagnostic of this infection to children and youngsters is one of these challenges. The authors approach this question from the perspective of the winnicottian concepts of interruption in the continuity of self and complete experience. The presentation of the psychoanalytic narrative of a thoroughly examined clinical case. The results leads to the conclusion that the process of diagnostic revelation can have its traumatic impact minimized/avoided when family members and staff provide emotional support to the patient. It favors, then, that patients live through the experience of approximation to the difficult truth; experience will not necessarily end up in the suppression of the possibility of the child or the youngster feeling alive, real, integrated and spontaneous.

Keywords

• psychoanalysis
• winnicott
• hiv?aids
• trauma
• psychotherapeutic intervention